


have wisdom/like this

by rain_sleet_snow



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Alderaan, Alderaanian Culture, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst and Romance, Bittersweet, Childhood Trauma, Clone Wars as History, Clonetrooper culture, During Canon, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Falling In Love, Family Secrets, Honesty, Male-Female Friendship, Mandalorian Culture, Mando'a, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Original Trilogy as Politics, Past Domestic Violence, Past Violence, Secrets, Slow Burn, Sorgan, Step-parents, The Alliance to Restore the Republic - Freeform, Trauma, Useless Lesbians, Women Being Awesome, Women in the Military, finding someone you can tell the truth, post-war politics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-19
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:14:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 53,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25383658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: When the Mandalorian leaves the village on Sorgan, Cara stays - for a while.
Relationships: Baby Yoda & The Mandalorian (The Mandalorian TV), Baby Yoda (The Mandalorian TV) & Winta (Star Wars), Cara Dune & Winta, Cara Dune/Omera (Star Wars), Kes Dameron & Cara Dune, Omera & Winta (Star Wars), Omera & her family, Omera/Winta's Father
Comments: 211
Kudos: 97





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic officially brought to you by Gina Carano's smile, COVID-19 lockdown, and that four-month period where I did not actually get to hug another human being, causing me to become _somewhat intense_. My most heartfelt thanks to SecondStarontheLeft/cosmonauthill, AMarguerite, and stitchingatthecircuitboard for holding my hand and egging me on as this "short, sweet fic" shot past my initial word count estimates of 3k, 10k, and 20k, and then for beta'ing the completed tale. It would be gibberish without you.

> _not one girl I think_
> 
> _who looks on the light of the sun_
> 
> _will ever_
> 
> **_have wisdom_ **
> 
> **_like this_ **
> 
> _\- Sappho_

Mando left around midday. The village felt a lot larger without him, which wasn't a huge surprise. Mandalorian warriors - complete with full suits of beskar armour, dark pasts, and foster children under a death sentence from the Bounty Hunters' Guild - took up a lot of space. Especially when they were busy being local heroes. 

Honestly, Cara still thought it would have been smarter to leave. They were vulnerable to pretty much anything out here, and Cara was very nearly certain that they hadn't got all the raiders. It would have been better to relocate, krill farms or no krill farms.

But then Cara was the one who had ended up waist-deep in a krill farm trying to shoot the viewport out of a fucking AT-ST, so really, she couldn't talk. She'd just stick around long enough to make sure the raiders didn't come back, the villagers didn't get sloppy, and nobody got overconfident. It was quiet around here. Pleasant. There were worse - and harder - ways to earn a crust, and hey, if she needed to hit somebody, the leftover raiders would probably oblige.

It'd be good. At least for a few weeks, until she got bored.

The kid who particularly liked to play with the Mandalorian's foster son was sulking. Her mother, Omera, the widow who’d kept trying to get information out of Mando, shook her head and walked back to the krill ponds to get on with the harvest, leaving the little girl to fold her arms and kick rocks.

"She'll get over it," Cara said to Omera, who glanced sideways at her, one elegant eyebrow arching in surprise, that long shining sheet of hair flicking just slightly.

"At least it's a normal thing to be sad about," Omera replied cryptically, startling Cara into framing a question before Omera's next sentence sent it right out of her head. "Dinner will be slightly later tonight. We lost some time, what with the parade." Her head jerked eloquently towards the road the Mandalorian had taken.

"You're still gonna feed me?"

Omera arched the other eyebrow, and her mouth twitched. "Are you going to give me a good reason not to?"

"No," Cara said. "I just thought that was about Mando. You two…" Cara waggled her eyebrows, and was met with a look that reminded her forcibly of her old colonel, who never used words when he could stare you into petrified submission instead.

"Don't get ahead of yourself," Omera said loftily, and carried on her dignified way, tying her hair back and pinning it as she walked.

Cara watched after her for a second, then laughed to herself and went back to her house to check on the sadly depleted store of weaponry. Mando had taken most of his extensive collection of goodies, of course, but Cara had stripped all the dead raiders for anything useful or valuable, and was still putting it into good order. A lot of it was soaked in pondwater, but still salvageable with work. Her main problem right now was keeping the kids out of it. A locked store was clearly going to be necessary.

Cara was stocktaking for the ammunition - one of those things most of the villagers did not get was necessary in a long-term storage situation, but which _very definitely was_ \- when she looked up and saw through the window that the kid Winta was still wandering around looking like a damp Centaxday on Hoth. She was following the frogs she liked to try to catch, but listlessly.

She didn't have a lot of companions, Cara thought. The widow was slightly apart from much of the rest of the village, especially now that everyone had seen exactly how good a shot she was - a trait that smelled dangerously of actual fighting experience. Cara had definitely seen her giving orders and being obeyed without question, during the battle. But she had no formal leadership role, and there was a slight twist to her accent that suggested she hadn't been born and brought up here. Winta didn't have that accent, but she was still one of very few children of her age, and she still stood out among the rest and played by herself. It made sense that she would miss the kid, who very obviously thought she was the greatest thing since the last frog he'd snorfled back - if for no other reason than that she kept helping him find frogs, and laughed and applauded when he caught them.

Kids. Weird.

Still, Cara thought. I could take a break. And it'll be a pain if the kid runs off and a loose raider shows up.

She locked away the ammunition and got up and tracked down the kid.

"Hey," she said.

"Hey," Winta replied.

"Still trying to get your frogs, huh."

"Yeah." Winta screwed her toe into the muddy ground, deep as it would go. Her jaw was set and mulish. "But I never get them. Little green was really _good_ at catching them."

Cara could have told the kid that naming someone like that was a sure-fire route to missing them like fuck, but that boat had clearly sailed. "That's because they're faster than you are," Cara said. "When things are faster than you are, you have to find a way to stop them knowing you're there until you get close."

Winta looked at her, then looked at the frogs.

"Can you eat these things?" Cara asked, wondering if she was going to like the answer.

"Yeah, but we mostly don't, because they eat pests and stuff." Winta hunched her shoulders. "They taste good if you cook them right."

Cara did not want to know what they tasted like if you cooked them wrong. She also thought she was about to regret her actions, but hell. It wouldn't kill her to make the kid smile. Call it community service. "Well. Let's figure out how to catch them, then."

  
  


It had to be said dinner tasted a lot better without Winta sitting around like their own personal little stormcloud. Even if Cara wasn't sure the mud would ever come out of her boots. 

"Did you really spend an afternoon chasing frogs?" the widow demanded, eyeing her with fascination.

"Not a whole afternoon," Cara deflected, and shrugged. "Winta was acting a miseryguts, someone needed to get her out of it."

"I wasn't expecting you to volunteer," Omera said. She gave Cara seconds without being asked.

  
  


After that, it seemed churlish not to help when Cara saw Omera struggling with something around the house, or just to do the washing up, or to lend a hand with the laundry. Cara had never been particularly domesticated, but she was capable of basic household tasks. And though she was technically still living in the village’s only communal building, the bar - fortunately they were all just drinking outside instead: Cara absolutely wasn’t going to countenance spotchka and weaponry in the same room - she had to admit Omera’s house was nicer, and being allowed to hang around it was pleasant. Omera didn’t talk to Cara quite the way she’d talked to the Mandalorian, but then, Cara had mostly seen her asking him difficult questions. And the Mandalorian kept himself almost obsessively to himself, except for the baby. Perhaps it was because of that - or because of the difficult questions - that Omera seemed to feel the need to turn on the charm for him in a way she didn’t for Cara. Which was a relief, because half of the time Cara had been itching with the need to call bullshit on at least one of them.

Omera also seemed surprised whenever Cara helped her with anything, which was weird.

“Thank you,” Omera said, for about the tenth time, sounding just as surprised as she had the other nine, and Cara gave up on biting her tongue about it and said:

  
“I wasn’t raised by wolves.” 

“Sorry?”  
  
“I’m not going to leave you to do all this by yourself.” Cara was beginning to feel like an idiot.

“What do you think I do when you’re not here?” Omera replied.

“You can’t have gone through your entire life without anyone helping you,” Cara said. “Every time you say thank you you sound shocked I could be a decent guest.”

Omera blinked at her for several long, awkward seconds. “It’s not a very helpful galaxy,” she said at last.

Cara had no idea what to say to that. 

“But thank you for the help with the laundry.”

“You’re welcome,” Cara replied.

  
  


The next morning Cara came round for breakfast - functionally she was just sleeping in the bar now; that, and keeping an eye on the village’s armoury, and dissuading kids and adults alike from getting into it - and found that Omera had a toolkit out on the side. Cara eyed it, then eyed Omera, and waited for her to talk.

“If you have some time on your hands today,” Omera said. “There’s a leak in the roof and I could use some help fixing it.”

“Yeah, I got time,” Cara replied. “What kind of a leak?”  
  


The kettle hissed; Omera made a pot of caf. “The kind that’s going to run down into my generator if I keep putting it off,” she said. She caught Cara’s eye and smiled wryly. “Things have been busy. But I can’t fix the generator if it breaks, and we’ve only got so many around here.”

  
Cara had in fact noticed that. Caben, wittering as usual, had mentioned that the village had intended to buy a larger main generator with the most recent harvest’s profits, before the Klatooinian raiders showed up. Instead what money hadn’t been paid out to Cara and the Mandalorian had been cashed in for stores, and until they could raise a good harvest of krill, they were all reliant on small solar-powered generators that could hardly juice a droid. The AT-ST had been stripped for parts, but finding a buyer for most of them would be tricky, and they weren’t all repurposable. “Should have told me earlier. I could have got it sorted for you.”

Omera shrugged. “I keep meaning to get it done, it’s just that something else always happens first.”

“This morning okay?” Cara said, taking the bowl of porridge and mug of caf - roughly the same size as the bowl and heavily sugared; Omera had picked that one up fast - Omera offered her.

“Perfect,” Omera said, meeting her eyes over her own mug of caf. Cara tried not to drop either her bowl or her mug.

“Great. Have you already eaten?”

  
  
“Winta slept badly,” Omera said, which, Cara suspected, meant _yes_ and also _I haven’t slept_ . “She has nightmares.”

  
It was a crying fucking shame that they were four years out from the end of the war and little kids like Winta still had bad dreams. But that kind of shit didn’t go away when treaties got signed or trials concluded. “The raiders, or other stuff?” Cara tilted her head. “You haven’t always lived here.”

“The raiders,” Omera said, dodging the question. “The last attack, the one which took the harvest - it came after a long period of quiet. We weren’t expecting them or watching for them. Winta was caught out near the edge of the krill ponds -”

Cara thought she might actually have stopped breathing. Winta was alive, and Cara had noticed no lingering injuries or scars, but that didn’t necessarily mean much.

“ - when I got to her we had no time to run. So we got into one of the ponds and flipped a basket over our heads and waited.”

_And waited_ , Cara thought. For how long, she wondered. “Clever,” she said at last. She was more confused than ever why Omera had insisted on staying, but she was clear on that much. It had been a smart way to hide, and probably the safest place in the village, too. The Klatooinians wouldn’t have wanted to get bogged down in the ponds.

“It was the pond with the AT-ST in,” Omera said, smiling into her caf. “The one you went for an unplanned swim in.”  
  


“Unplanned? I definitely thought that through.”

“Oh, excuse me,” Omera said, and almost laughed. Cara felt herself smile in response, almost automatically.

There was a long, content silence. Outside, Cara could hear Winta yelling a count of ten for a game of hide and seek.

“She have these dreams a lot?” 

Omera shrugged, and for the first time Cara really thought she looked tired. “They come and go. Never quite the same. While the Mandalorian was here she dreamed she was hiding with the baby and trying to keep him quiet. Now she dreams she’s entirely alone.”

Well, that put a woman right off her breakfast. Cara resorted to her caf instead, and Omera resorted to silence.

“How about that roof,” Cara said, when they had both finished their drinks, and - five minutes later - found herself boosting Omera up into the gutter. Omera was tall and solid and didn’t hold back when she boosted off Cara’s palms, and honestly, Cara wondered how the hell she’d ever thought the woman was fragile.

  
Maybe it was those enormous brown eyes. Cara was fairly sure she would believe all manner of things if Omera looked her in the eye while she said them.

“I thought I was going to sort this out for you,” Cara shouted up after Omera, who was halfway up the peaked roof and still moving.

“And I thought you were going to help me,” Omera shouted back.

Cara swore, slung the toolkit over her back, and started to climb.

  
  


It took half the morning to fix the roof, but Cara had dropped from the edge of the roof and was helping Omera down by the time the air started to turn heavy and thick in the way that meant it was about to storm. Omera handed the toolkit to Cara, and then turned to ease herself down; Cara saw her grip falter before it failed and stepped forward to catch her, quick with alarm, but Omera grabbed the gutter and managed to slow her fall. Cara caught her anyway.

“Watch it,” she managed, steadying Omera.

“It’s not high,” Omera said, sounding slightly less composed than usual.

“Still not a good idea to fall off it.” Cara tried to let go of her casually, stepped back, and looked up at the sky. “I think we’re in for another thunderburst.”

Omera pushed her hair off her face and squinted up at the clouds. “Yes. I have to get the drying racks.”

“Okay. Yes. Will you still be shooting later, if it clears?”

“Only if I can get someone to watch Winta,” Omera said distractedly. “She hates the noise -” 

Thunder cracked high in the humid air. Omera and several other villagers converged on the drying racks, and Cara heard a distracted shout about the droids and went to drag a currently non-functional bastardised astromech into the nearest dry space that was definitely going to stay that way. It happened to be the bar.

“We don’t want to bother you,” Stoke said. He kept watching Cara like she freaked him out, which was ridiculous, given that he’d hired her in the first place. Or, more accurately, hired the Mandalorian - and Cara was a lot less worrying than he had been. Maybe she’d just yelled at Stoke one too many times. He hadn’t been particularly good with a spear and he wasn’t trying to practice now.

“You’re not bothering me.” Cara shrugged, and sat down next to the makeshift weapons store she’d put together. There was always something else to do to keep the fucking things clean and functioning, even if she was now confident she had a good working idea of how much stock they had and how long it would last, and most of the village didn’t keep or care for weapons. Frankly, Cara didn’t trust more than three of them with an otherwise unattended blaster. The rest hadn’t shot her in the back by accident when she’d pulled that outstandingly stupid stunt with the Mandalorian’s pulsar rifle, but Cara preferred not to rely on them beyond that.

“If you’re staying we should figure out somewhere that’s your own space for you to live,” Yali said, squatting down next to the droid. She was the village’s one competent mechanic, and from what Cara had understood, the astromech was a long-term project intended to replace the droid that currently ran the gravsled to and from the town Cara had originally landed in. The astromech’s being shorted out by Klatooinian raiders had not improved Yali’s chances of success, but she wasn’t giving up. 

“I thought she and -” Stoke began, and then shut up very quickly.

Cara got out a maintenance kit and started cleaning, without dignifying Stoke’s half a sentence with any kind of response. “Worry about an armoury first,” she said. “You need to keep all this shit locked away, dry, monitored, and clean. You don’t want the kids getting into it. And you don’t want it not to work when you need it.”

She squinted out of the window through the thick sheets of rain. The temperature, and the air pressure, had dropped like a stone. She could just about see Omera, running back into her house and chasing Winta ahead of her, probably soaked to the skin. 

  
  


Cara went and found Winta before the hour set aside for target shooting by those villagers who were respectably good at it or wanted to improve. All of them were aware that the raiders might not be gone for good; a few had advanced to the realisation that there were other vicious bastards out there, which was probably why nobody had yet complained that they were still feeding and housing Cara. (Cara had yet to figure out where the AT-ST came from, and that kept her awake some nights. You didn’t usually find the heavy stuff like that if there wasn’t small stuff around too. She and Mando had ripped apart the Klatooinians’ camp, but there was still nothing to say where they had bought - or more likely stolen - it.) Winta was too young to handle a weapon, nine or ten at most, and Cara had never seen her watch the target shooting, even to see her mother hand everyone present except Cara their ass on a platter. If she wanted to do it but had an issue with the sound, that might be fixable.

Winta was sitting on the porch, doing a session of long-distance school. The nearest actual school was hours away on the slow gravsled, too far to commute, and the road was isolated and too dangerous for a bunch of kids by themselves: the children in the village were dependent on state-sponsored digital school sessions on basic datapads, whatever their parents could teach them, and circulating teachers who came round the backwoods communities occasionally. Cara had seen them pass by once already, and thought they did the best with what they could. Winta was quick, though; Cara didn’t need to be some kind of Jedi to figure out that when she was old enough for secondary schooling she’d qualify, and Omera would move mountains to get it for her, even if they had to move to one of the more populated planets in the system. It didn’t take a genius to decode the wistful look on Omera’s face when she watched Winta studying.

“Can I interrupt?” Cara said, sitting down on the porch.

  
“Lesson’s finished,” Winta said. “So yeah.”

“Your mom was going to practise shooting today,” Cara said. “She’s really good. I heard you don’t like the sound, though.”

  
“Yeah.” Winta squirmed and twisted her fingers, the kind of full-body discomfort only little kids really remember how to express. “I know it’s stupid.”  
  


“It’s not stupid,” Cara said. “Do you want to see your mom shoot?”

Winta hesitated.

“Open question, kid.”

“I want to see her win,” Winta said, with a kind of bright, sly pride that made Cara grin. So it technically wasn’t a competition. Clearly everyone knew who was wiping the floor with whom.

“Okay.” Cara pulled a small clear plastic box out of her pocket. “Earplugs. Look, you twist them so they’re smaller, and you pull your ear back just a bit so you can put them in, and hold them there for a count of ten. You can try them. See if they work.”  
  


Winta took the box from her and turned it over and over in her hands. Tiny hands, Cara thought, and remembered again exactly how small all these kids were, exactly how small they’d looked when Omera shut them into the sturdiest of the houses with the Mandalorian’s foundling. They were too small to be scared of all the things they knew about.

“Okay,” Winta repeated finally, and gave Cara a very small smile.

Cara was not totally surprised when a small figure with chin-length wavy brown hair wormed her way through the crowd and fetched up next to Cara, one hand tugging on Cara’s shirt. Cara ruffled Winta’s hair so she looked up, and spotted the fluorescent orange flash of earplugs in her ears. 

  
Cara grinned, and flicked her a hand-sign for _greeting, acknowledge_. She really was surprised when Winta replied with a matching hand-sign and a toothy smile, since Cara most definitely had not taught her that and she wasn’t aware of any other Alliance veterans on the planet, but hell. Maybe it had been Winta’s dad.

She covered her surprise, and pointed at Omera, who was nailing the target for the fifth time in the row. It was like she didn’t even have to try, which was possibly true. This was too easy for her, Cara thought. Someone had really trained her at some point - maybe from an early age. She had good habits that the Mandalorian had tried to teach the others, but which hadn’t quite stuck. Omera had slipped straight into them like they were second nature.

She needed a challenge, Cara thought unbidden, and then tried to get that thought out of her head. Omera didn’t need to be a spectacularly good shot, she just needed to be good enough to keep her village and her kid safe, and she sure as hell met that standard.

Winta, for reasons that probably made sense to kids, stood on one foot and leaned heavily into Cara’s side. Cara laid a hand on her shoulder automatically to keep her balanced, and looked down to check on the kid. Winta was watching her mother avidly, no eyes for anything else.

Omera finished, and stepped aside to let someone else set up a fresh target and have a go. She laughed at something Jorgan said to her, and made safe the blaster she’d been using before looking back towards Cara.

Winta waved at her mother. Omera’s jaw actually dropped, and Winta giggled - sounding slightly dislocated, probably because of the earplugs - and ran over to Omera, who knelt down and hugged her very tightly. Cara couldn’t actually hear the conversation, but she could figure out its outlines from Omera’s surprise, Winta’s gestures. Yep. Showing off the earplugs. She only hoped the girl remembered to take them out some time.

Winta ran off to play, and Omera came over to Cara.

“She’s proud of you,” Cara said. “She wanted to see. I just helped her figure out how.”

  
  
“Thank you,” Omera said, very softly.

Cara shrugged and smiled.


	2. Chapter 2

The thunderstorms got worse. Cara’s sojourn in the Sugano system hadn’t actually begun with Sorgan - she'd tried the capital planet, also called Sugano, and decided it was just too busy for her purposes; she'd hitched a lift and been dropped off on Sorgan at a whim - and she hadn’t been on-planet long enough to know if that was normal. She consulted a weather service, and learned that it wasn’t just normal but a regular feature of the climate, and that the cycle should break in a fortnight or so. In the meantime she would just have to live with the rain, the mud, the mosquitoes, and the memories of her least favourite deployments as she patrolled the woods, looking for any sign that the Klatooinian raiders were making a serious effort to regroup. She and Mando had scared off a couple early on, and there had been no signs of anything since then, but carelessness didn't pay. And Cara kept thinking of all the lives that would be fucked up if they collectively got sloppy.

She didn't have to be pleased about the mud plastered up to her thighs or the rain running cold into her eyes, though.

Cara trudged out of the woods and onto the safe paths between the krill ponds, absent-mindedly considering the best way to booby-trap them if necessary. Thunder clashed overhead, and what felt like an entire small cloud emptied down the back of her jacket. Cara shuddered.

Any raider would have to be a fucking idiot to be out in this, she thought.

Most of the village houses had closed curtains and shutters against the mosquitoes, but lights glowed behind them. The bar, of course, was cold and empty. Omera's house had the shutters open still, though the curtains were down and there were fewer lights on; she was probably watching out to make sure Cara showed up again without any special guests following her. Normally Cara would just wave, but she couldn't see even a blurred shape behind the curtains. She changed direction, and headed for the house, only to stop dead before the porch.

She could hear singing. After a stupid, blinking, stunned moment, in which a mosquito seized the day and bit her, she realised that the silvery, soft voice she could hear was Omera's - and also that she recognised the song, which wasn't in Basic, or any other language she'd heard the villagers use. There had been a few old-timers who sang it, back with the Rebellion, at the close of the day - Blitz, her first trainer, that one old guy with the Pathfinders, a few others, and then later everyone they taught. She could only half-hear it, over the storm, but that probably explained why she could hear it at all. Omera didn't know she was here.

"-  _ Motir ca'tra nau tracinya, gra'tua cuun hett su dralshy'a, aruetyc talyc runi'la solus cet o'r _ …"

There was an unfamiliar lilt to the words, though, like the song had been repurposed, or like someone had heard the original tune a long time ago. Cara's mind filled in the following lines, and she caught her lips moving to them automatically, the kind of stupid tell she'd tried to iron out.

Why the hell was Omera singing the  _ Vode An _ as a  _ lullaby _ ? Did she know what the words meant?

Cara thought about Winta's handsign which Cara hadn't taught her, and Omera's trigger discipline which had been flawless from the start, and wondered if maybe Omera did. And if so, now was probably not the time to call her on it.

She guessed at how long the rest of the song would take, retraced her steps a bit, and returned to the house, deliberately making a lot of noise on the porch. A shadow moved swiftly behind the curtains, and then the door opened, revealing Omera. And a blaster rifle. Cara was weirdly touched that she had decided to wait up armed.

"I couldn't see you so I thought I'd let you know I was back," Cara said, trying not to sneeze. A further mosquito bite supplied her with a diversion; she swore and slapped it dead instead. 

"You look like hell," Omera said, giving Cara a once-over that would have made Cara want to blush if she weren't thirty fucking four and perfectly well accustomed to beautiful women. 

Cara shrugged. "I'll dry out."

"There isn't even a water heater in that bar. Come in. Stay until the rain stops, at least."

"You sure? It's settled in for the night."

"I think I can cope, Cara."

Sometimes Cara kind of wanted to hear what her full name would sound like on Omera's tongue, but that was not a helpful thought when she was being ushered inside and efficiently stripped of most of her sodden outer gear. Cara removed assorted knives and a blaster before Omera could cut or shoot herself.

Omera nodded at the screened-off corner used as a bathroom. "I doubt there's enough hot water for you to shower, but you can at least get clean, and I'll leave out a shirt and shorts for you."

"It's kind of you, but -"

"Why not stop that sentence there?" Omera said, and smiled. "The things you're wearing are drenched. You'll freeze and end up with a horrible cold."

Cara caved to superior force, and went to change. Omera was right about the hot water - it was just about warm - but there was enough that she could get reasonably clean and rinse her hair in the basin. Omera kept her word and left clothes just the other side of the screen, and called through softly that there was a hot drink when Cara was ready. Cara shivered, mostly not because she was cold, and tried on the clothes. She'd expected they wouldn't fit at all, but once they were on she realised that she and Omera must be very close in height, and that clothes that were loose on Omera's less muscled frame just about fit her. She'd always had the impression that Omera was taller and much slimmer; she'd forgotten to account for Omera thinking things through again. She kept making that mistake, and she couldn't figure out  _ why _ when Omera was so obviously responsible for most of the forward thinking around here, unless it was that she wasn't used to people being thoughtful. Mando cutting her in on the original trip out here was about as far as it went, lately.

Cara pinched a bit of insect repellent from the tub by the basin and smudged it onto the back of her neck and her arms and ankles. She looked in vain for something to stop the bites itching, but gave it up as a bad job when all she found was more soap and a shabby little bath toy shaped like a tooka cat which must have been Winta's. She hung her wet clothes over the top of the screen instead, and tried to towel her hair dry.

"Do you mind if I borrow a comb?"

"No. Next to the mirror." Omera closed and bolted the shutters audibly, and the kettle went off the boil.

When Cara stepped out from behind the screen, her first thought was that the whole arrangement looked very domestic. Like pretty much all the village houses, Omera's was a single large room divided up with screens and sliding doors, the main open part of the house dedicated to kitchen and living facilities, everything else handled with screens or possibly a loft. Omera's differed from the others only in that there was a sort of daybed thing off to one side, which Cara had mostly seen Winta using as a perch to study when it was raining hard or somewhere to nap on days after very bad nights. Currently, the sliding door to Winta's little bedroom was closed, a night light glowing in the tiny gap between door and floor. The door to Omera's own room was still slightly open, but there was no light on, and Cara couldn't see inside. It shouldn't have intrigued her - she'd been in here plenty of times during the day and seen the door wide open, the bed, the bedside cabinet that locked and the clothes rail - but it was hard to look away. And when she did look away she found herself looking at the soft glow of the solar lamp on the table, the chairs set out like Omera had always intended to sit and have tea with her, like they always had conversations like this. Even the tea smelled familiar, brewing faintly herbal in old metal cups. It always tasted a bit soapy to Cara, but she'd somehow acquired a taste for it anyway.

Omera double-checked all the shutters and the door, and sat down at the table. Cara took the seat opposite her, and picked up her cup with a nod of thanks. Omera smiled slightly, and nodded back.

"Were you expecting me to be followed back?" Cara asked, and kicked herself when Omera looked confused. "The rifle, I mean." She had known, of course, that Omera regularly signed out a weapon and ammunition. She wasn't remotely worried about that. Omera was one of the three people she trusted to manage them responsibly, even with a kid in the house. Winta was not fond of blasters, and sometimes didn't even want to watch the practices with earplugs in, but she had been as carefully drilled in weapons safety as someone had once drilled Omera.

The bit she hadn't figured out was why Omera was doing it, and this might be her answer.

"Oh. Not really." Omera sipped at her tea. "But if you'd been followed back, I thought you'd make it very clear."

Cara snorted. "Yeah, I wouldn't keep quiet about that." She wrapped her hands around the cup, and felt the warmth returning to them; they had flexed and loosened while she washed, but were still chilled.

"You look like the only thing that followed you was the mosquitoes."

Cara grimaced. "Those bastard things must think I'm an exotic takeaway. I can't get shot of them." 

"Maybe you just taste sweet to them," Omera suggested, with a small private smile, and then, before Cara had recovered from that enough to think of something to say, added: "I have cream for the itching, if you want."

"Please." Omera pushed a tube across the table towards Cara, who took it and smeared cream over the bites. "I've never been so glad the Alliance stuck me with every vaccine they could buy." 

"Really?"

Cara pushed up the sleeve on her left arm to show the sunken blotch of skin. "Stung worse than the tattoo. My arm was numb for days."

“Ouch.” Omera’s eyes flickered over Cara’s arms briefly, and then she looked back into Cara’s eyes and sipped at her tea. “Singa sends medics around with free immunisation updates twice a year if you need a booster. No questions asked.”

Cara shook her head. “Pretty sure another dose would be toxic.” She took a gulp of her tea, and set the mug down to start coming through her hair. It was knotted and brittle under her fingers; she set her jaw and tugged the comb through it, starting at the ends. Omera's eyes played softly over her face, and then lowered to her cup of tea. Cara yanked through a knot and cleared her throat. "So. Singa administer this planet?"

Cara’s geography knowledge was not strong, but she more or less knew how the Sugano system was made up. Sugano itself was the most densely populated and wealthy of the planets, Sorgan the least so - barring a few moons with tiny mining settlements, and Cara had never fancied mines. They tended to be profitable and controllable, and therefore tricky to find an unobtrusive foothold in. Singa was the closest of the other planets in the system to Sorgan, but Cara had never heard of the two being linked.

"Up to a point. They speak for us in the system parliament, and subsidise some medical care and education. A few people every year go off-planet to study and train there, but no-one from round here - not for a while. Since there's nothing for them to make money off, we're mostly undisturbed."

"They didn't deal with the raiders for you?" Obviously not, Cara thought to herself. Or she herself wouldn't be here.

"We reported it," Omera said dryly. "They said we'd get a reply back in fourteen business days."

Cara couldn't stop herself laughing. Omera's mouth twitched in response. "Did you?"

"No. And people were dying. So."

Cara's laughter died likewise. "So Caben and Stoke went and found the Mando, and he brought me in."

Omera tipped her cup of tea in agreement.

"You can't tell me that was their idea." Cara had dealt with Caben and Stoke. They were nice enough guys and great krill farmers, but not equipped for conflict. And they were not strategic thinkers.

"I let them think it was."

Cara raised an eyebrow. "You can tell me you don't run shit around here, Omera. I won't believe you."

Omera snorted. "I've lived here seven years, Cara. I'm still an off-worlder. And the headman had just been killed. If I'd stepped in-" She paused and shrugged. "It wouldn't have gone down well."

Cara said nothing.  _ The Alliance would have snapped you up _ , she thought, with a sudden strange pang of some kind of feeling she couldn't put a name to - some mix of pride and anger and resentment, not at Omera, but on her behalf.  _ You and your shooting skills and your leadership.  _

They wouldn't have been able to afford to do otherwise. Cara remembered the tenuous years before Yavin. They needed every leader they could get. But so had these people, and they had apparently almost wasted what they had. Fucking shit-for-brains.

Cara ripped her comb through another tangle.

"They're very set in their ways," Omera said, choosing her words carefully. "And it's a quiet place. A quiet little backwater. They didn't know anything about… living under threat."

"Peaceful place to settle down and raise a kid," Cara said neutrally.

"That was the idea," Omera replied, not without irony.

Cara combed through a section of hair that had gone loose and knot-free, and moved on to the next disaster. Omera watched her absently through half-lidded eyes, thumb smoothing over the metal of the cup.

"I thought Mando was going to stay," Cara admitted. Omera smiled. "Okay. Hoped, maybe. It would have been good for him. For the kid."

Omera shook her head. "He was always going to move on."

"You tried pretty hard to persuade him otherwise."

"Like you said. It would have been good for him." Omera finished her tea. "But I knew he wasn't going to stay, even if he left the little one with me. Do you want more?"

Cara glanced distractedly at her cup. It was still half full. "No, thanks." 

Omera got up and made herself a second cup. Cara combed out the last of the tangles and started braiding it off her face. If she slept on it loose and wet she'd only have to do this again in the morning. The rain hammered down on the roof.

"What about you?" Omera said, after some time had passed.

"What about me?"

"Do you think this place is good for you?" 

Cara's breath stopped in her throat. Omera came back to the table and sat down, smiling slightly, cup of tea between her hands. Cara's breathing returned, uneven.

"You don't have to answer me right now," Omera said, quite gently, considering. "It's a question with a lot of answers. I ask it myself all the time."

That didn't help. Cara closed her mouth and opened it again, then closed it, and looked back down at the table.

"If you stay, we'll build you your own place. But in the meantime, you can't keep living in the bar."

Cara's heart sank slightly. She shifted her weight, and picked up the strand of braid she had just dropped. "Yeah, I've been wondering why you let me and Mando occupy that for so long."

One of those expressive eyebrows flickered. "The first thing the raiders took was the alcohol."

"So what the hell were we drinking?"

"Very raw spotchka," Omera said, with a faint grimace. "In any case - it's mostly used for community meetings. We just had them outside instead. There wasn't much that was contentious to settle." Omera stretched her feet out. "In any case, there's going to be a wedding in a couple of weeks. The date wasn't set until a few days ago; the bride wanted to be sure the raiders had gone. We'll use the bar for that. So what I suggest is you stay here."

Cara dropped the braid entirely and had to re-separate the strands. Thank fuck it was on the back of her head by now and Omera couldn't see. "You sure?"

"Certain," Omera said calmly. "I like your company. You're good with Winta, and she's comfortable with you. I have space. We can rearrange things to give you more privacy."

Cara tied off the braid as slowly as possible, by way of a diversion. "I don't know what to say."

"Stay tonight," Omera said, with a small smile and a quick glance at the shutters. It was still raining heavily. "Figure it out in the morning."

Cara looked back involuntarily at the daybed, and realised it had been made up with a blanket and pillows, and a mosquito net was tied up above it. Her jaw dropped open. "Did you plan this?"

"Planned? No. Hoped? Maybe."

Cara stared at her. 

Omera smiled very slightly. "Will you stay?"

"Yes," Cara said. Her voice came out uneven - thick and stupid - her eyes seemed riveted to Omera's unreadable ones - she couldn't look away. "Yeah, I'll - yeah, I'll stay."

"Thank you," Omera said, and some dim part of Cara noticed she no longer seemed surprised when she thanked Cara for things. But she was still smiling. "You can pass me your cup, if you've finished."

Cara passed over her cup obediently, and felt some kind of spark of something slip between the two of them, like static electricity. Omera set the cups in the sink for later. 

"I'm glad that's settled," she said. "For now. I'll go to bed, then." She smiled at Cara. "I'll see you in the morning."

"Goodnight," Cara answered, entirely automatically, and realised only after the door to that mysterious darkened room had slid closed behind Omera that she hadn't moved a muscle for at least five minutes.


	3. Chapter 3

The day of the wedding dawned soaking wet but not actually raining; they’d had three straight days of storms, but the weather seemed to have cleared. Omera hoped it would keep off. She didn’t think that rain would be unlucky, as such, but it would definitely complicate the celebrations; the number of guests they were anticipating wouldn’t fit in the bar easily, and they didn’t have other communal facilities. As matters stood, the bar - after acting as a surrogate home for weeks - needed major rearranging, the most important aspect of which was hiding all the weapons. Cara had been very clear about the need to keep them out of tipsy hands, and while most of the village was much too much in awe of her not to do exactly as she said, Omera had her doubts about the newcomers. She’d already heard a lot of curiosity from their guests about the outsider.

Omera rolled her eyes to herself, quietly. So it had only taken seven years, the advent of an entire Klatooinian raiding party, a lot of deaths, a Mandalorian, a small green baby and an ex-Rebel to stop her being an object of curiosity herself. At least it had happened. She hoped Cara was prepared for the scrutiny.

The weapons locker had been hidden in Yali and Kristofa’s house. Kristofa didn’t drink, so had volunteered to help keep an eye on the locker, and Yali kept her house securer than most because of the tools and droid components she scavenged; Omera could see the two of them and Cara exit the house, deep in conversation. A horde of children shot past carrying the garlands that had occupied several wet days indoors, and one of them tripped: Cara grabbed the boy by the back of his shirt and rebalanced him without even looking, and then diverted to the bar when someone yelled for her. Omera craned her neck and nearly started off the veranda. Stoke, with a ladder that was clearly too unwieldy for him, and which he was definitely about to bring down on Aliyo’s  _ head  _ -

Cara grabbed it, rebalanced it, and visibly gave him a piece of her mind. Not that Omera could hear, from here, but she was getting pretty familiar with what Cara looked like when she was ticking someone off. It was something about the set of the shoulders and the slight tilt of the head - and the slant of her mouth, but Omera couldn’t see that from here.

_ Nice job. Think I can’t do any worse. _

Omera squashed a smile at the memory, and then realised that her eyes were lingering on Cara’s arms and shoulders. Again.

Either she needed to be more subtle or she was also going to be dealing with a lot of scrutiny.

Cara, Stoke, and Stoke’s working party had sorted out the ladder and were now scrambling around hanging garlands. Winta was running around handing out bits of decoration, looking bright and excited and keen to be wearing her newest clothes and special braids - which she had only sat still for because Omera had let her have chocolate with breakfast, since pretty braids were one thing, and sitting still for them another thing entirely. Omera yanked on her own braids, two long fine plaits tight to her scalp at her temples, flowing into her loose hair at the back, and at least in theory hanging down with the trailing tails of the bandscarf most of the village women would be wearing today. And so would Omera. At the last possible moment. 

Omera tied on an apron and went to deal with the cooking. Winta ran into her, threw her arms around her, and giggled; Omera laughed, and patted her daughter’s shoulders. “Are you having fun?”

“Yeah!” Winta lifted her head and grinned at Omera. “Did you and my dad have a wedding like this?”

“Kind of,” Omera smiled, meaning  _ no _ . “There were flowers like the ones you picked, but not so many people. The important thing is you have your family and your community around you.”   
  


Both her parents had been dead when she married, and a cramped little registry office was no match for a huge celebration with everyone you’d grown up with and more than half the people you knew. But Winta could join those dots at a developmentally appropriate age, and then, hopefully, make some better choices than her mother. 

Winta ran off again at a call from Aliyo, and Omera went to help with the cooking. 

Several hours later, she found herself back in her house, neatening her braids, tidying her dress, and eyeballing the inevitable bandscarf. She could hear Cara’s heavy footsteps - Cara tended to walk heels down and hard unless she was feeling the need to be sneaky, in which case she was silent; Omera could only imagine how long it must have taken her to train herself out of making her presence felt - but ignored them. The odds were Cara would neither notice nor comment on her absorption: she had certainly seen or heard stranger things over the last two weeks in this house than Omera looking at a scarf. 

“You’re looking at that thing like you want to set it on fire, and I would be happy to help.”

Of course, the odds were not always in Omera’s favour.

She sighed, and turned to look at Cara, who was lounging against the doorjamb. The doorway now looked like it had been created to frame her. “I had a job where we had to wear our hair back in tight caps. I hated it.” The band was always too tight, and sweat always caked under it, metal dust caught in it. Omera had had painfully irritated skin and constant spots from fourteen to seventeen, and there was nothing she missed about that job less.

“Don’t wear it, then.” 

“It’s polite,” Omera said.

“I am  _ not  _ wearing one of those,” Cara said with conviction. “But then no-one’s ever expected me to be polite.”   
  


_ Not after they’ve seen you grin like that, anyway _ , Omera thought. She sighed deeply, and tied the band on. There. Done.  _ And now _ , she thought, lying to herself, _ I can ignore it _ . “You’re not local.”

“Neither are you. Originally.” 

Omera grimaced at her. “I live here now.” She nodded at the blue fabric braid she’d left on the table. “I did find a bit of blue braid for you, if you want something to match with the rest of us. Since it’s an occasion.”

“I didn’t think about it, but… sure.” Cara sauntered in, and picked up the braid. “What am I supposed to do with it?”   
  
“I can tie it into your plait, if you don’t mind me redoing it for you.”   
  


“Sure,” Cara said, and sat down on a chair when Omera gestured wordlessly with a comb. Omera went to stand behind her, and pulled out the pair of slides keeping Cara’s single side braid in place.

In Cara’s defence, she had very clearly tidied herself up. Obviously she felt this was an occasion for her too; maybe she felt like part of the community. Her hair was certainly neater than usual, although given that it had been cut into choppy lengths it was difficult to keep it too tidy. Omera ran the comb through it quickly, re-parted it, and then sectioned the left side for a braid.

“Did you get this cut or did someone shoot lengths of it off?” she asked absently, tilting Cara’s head slightly with fingertips on her jaw to make it easier for Omera to braid. Cara complied easily, and Omera felt her cheeks heat for no stupid reason at all; Cara took a second to respond, and Omera tried not to jump into the conversation.

“No, I - uh, some of it got scorched, so I just cut a chunk off, and some of it got some sticky stuff in it, so I cut that off too - some guy wrenched some out -”

“Anyone I can shoot?” Omera joked, and Cara laughed, possibly the only person in the village who would.

“Nah, I dealt with him first.”

Omera twisted the blue braid into the plait, and started to pull in new small sections to build the plait, sectioning them off with the edge of her nail. Cara’s breathing hitched slightly, and Omera paused.

“Did I scratch you?”

“No,” Cara said. “Don’t stop - I mean, you don’t need to stop.”

Omera stared down at the top of her head, and took up the braid again when she felt like she could do so without needing to sit down. 

“I’m just not used to someone else doing my hair.”

“You mean it wasn’t an essential skill in the Rebellion?”   
  


Cara chuckled, and the tension died. “No.”

“How come you never just cut it short?”

Cara paused. Omera paused too.

“I’m from Alderaan,” Cara said eventually. The words dropped into the quiet and spread, like ripples in the krill ponds; they sounded like the dead and smoking fearful silence after the raid, when Omera had flipped the basket off her daughter’s head and raised her face into the open air. The laughter and music outside felt horribly distant.

“Hair is important there?” Omera asked carefully, picking up the last strands of the plait, pulling it tight enough along the curve of Cara’s skull to stay, loose enough that it wouldn’t ache.

“Yeah,” Cara said, sounding like her voice had gone slightly rough. “Really important. I mean, most people don’t worry about more than the basics, but it’s still - you only cut your hair short for mourning. Like - the deepest grief.” A pause. “I don’t want to live in that. Not - forever.”

Omera slid the pins back into Cara’s hair, holding the braid and its blue streak in place, and laid one of her hands lightly on Cara’s shoulder. The second she held down over Cara’s other shoulder, where Cara could see it, an open offer. After a second, Cara’s hand came up and clasped hers tightly; the same size, but boxier, more calloused, stronger.

“We’re not dead,” Cara said. “Planet’s gone. We’re not. I’m not the only Alderaanian. We still got a senator and everything.” 

There was a faint, bitter irony lilting over her last sentence. Omera responded to that rather than the determined resilience of her words, and gripped Cara’s hand and shoulder tighter.

“I’m sorry,” she said gently. She’d lost her own family, piece by piece; but never all at once, and never a whole planet gone, too.

“Thanks for the braid,” Cara said, squeezed Omera’s fingers, and let go. Omera lifted her hands away. “It looks good.”

“You haven’t seen it yet.”   
  


Cara twisted to look up at her. Her eyes were a little brighter than usual, but still she gave that devastating grin, the one that made Omera think all kinds of ridiculous things. “It’s your work. I know it’s good.”   
  
“You flatter me,” Omera said, rolling her eyes.

“And you’re definitely making the scarf work. It’s a generally terrible look. But you’re making it work.”   


  
Omera laughed.

The guests arrived on time, bringing the local registrar with them. Omera had had her doubts, rather because of her knowledge of the registrar than because she thought Danae was likely to back out. She and Caben had been dating for years and would have been married long before if not for the complication of the raiders, which had essentially put an end to all travel between the two villages. Danae's home enjoyed a much more sheltered position, high on a hill, and made their money not from krill ponds but from the deep river which curved around the base of the hill, a further defence on one side. They also had a much closer relationship with the local administration, which was probably how they'd got the registrar to show up. Sober, too, and looking much more pleasant than he had when he'd recorded Omera and Winta's arrival in the census two years before. Omera had merely sent word to him of the several deaths at the hands of the raiders, thinking he probably wouldn't show up to a dangerous town, and also thinking that she didn't want to expose the Mandalorian, his foundling, and Cara to official notice or questions. Sugano as a system was still thinking about whether to join the New Republic, according to the last news Omera had had, but if they did and the agreement included data-sharing, then trouble might be incoming. If not from the New Republic then from any bad actors that could get access to their databases.

Omera reminded herself not to borrow trouble, and joined in the cheering and the procession to the arch before the forest, where the two groups of people filed neatly to either side and bride and groom stepped forward to meet each other. Normally words of greeting would be uttered by the respective leaders of each village, but they currently had no leader, since they'd had no time to hold elections; Omera had had an awkward conversation with Caben and Yali while they figured out who would speak the words. She'd had to assure them that she had no interest in doing so, and that she knew it would look odd for someone who hadn't grown up here to speak. Still, they'd told her, with great and obvious relief, given everything she'd done for them, it would be appropriate for her to stand in the front rank. Omera had thanked them very gravely and refrained from saying  _ this is my home, too _ , or  _ what else would I have done?, _ or even  _ who else do you think would have acted? _

Omera cast a glance sideways and spotted Winta among the crowd of children, grouped together and trying to be solemn, with occasional outbursts into giggles as the registrar ran through the ceremony. She looked just like any of them, talked just like any of them, was just like any of them, and maybe in twenty years' time she wouldn't be asked to deal with outsiders because she must instinctively understand them, or reminded daily that she could dress and talk and act like her neighbours but she'd never be one of them. Maybe. Omera had been more confident before that last raid, and the way the other villagers had fled terrified before the onslaught and left Winta frozen and screaming on the ground.

The registrar, a rather pompous individual, had got to the end of his first sentence by the time Cara murmured in her ear: "Thought he was never going to breathe."

Omera clamped down on instinctive laughter and restored a sweet and suitably soppy smile to her face. Nobody had told Cara where to stand, so she was just standing directly behind Omera, and because the crowd had bunched up she was close enough that Omera could feel every millimetre between them. Hell, when Cara spoke she could feel Cara's breath on her ear. "It's the traditional form," she murmured.

"Is it going to take traditionally hours? Because I've stood through enough endless medal ceremonies."

"It takes ten minutes. And it's not a medal ceremony, it's a very beautiful coming together of two people in love, so you can stand still and hush."

Omera did not turn around, but she knew Cara was grinning as she went quiet. 

Omera refocussed her attention on the ceremony. Danae and Caben drank from the same cup and ate from the same bowl; their wrists were tied together with the traditional blue bands, and then they untied the knot and retwisted the bands into individual bracelets, Danae’s tied around Caben’s wrist, Caben’s tied around Danae’s.

“Never noticed anyone wearing one of those before,” Cara observed.

“Most people replace them with steel bracelets after the first year, and keep the band somewhere safe.  _ Shush _ .”

The registrar glared at the assembled company - probably not directly at Omera and Cara; one of Danae’s attendants had stood on someone’s foot and a small scuffle had broken out. He called on Danae and Caben’s attendants to answer for them that they were free to wed and secure of intention, and then on Danae and Caben to confirm the same thing. He called on their community to vow support - Omera chimed in in the right place, and didn’t hear what, if anything, Cara said - and then started the actual vows. 

“Do you swear to love and support each other, in darkness and in sunlight, in joy and sorrow, in danger and in safety?”

Danae and Caben answered that they swore.

“Do you swear to share what you are given, accept what you receive, and take only what you are offered?”   
  


Once more Danae and Caben swore. Omera, knowing the next vow, took a deep breath and held it.

“Do you swear to show kindness, compassion, and love, all the days of your lives until you shall be parted?”

Danae and Caben swore. Omera let out her long, shaky breath under cover of the cheering, and turned the uneven expression on her face into a smile that might ring a little false but no more so than anyone would expect on a young widow. She’d done this before, and it had passed, and the pain would pass, too. 

But she hadn’t been standing directly in front of Cara Dune then. As she let her breath out Cara shifted her weight forward, and her fingertips brushed Omera’s wrist; Omera’s head jerked round, and she realised as she met Cara’s eyes that Cara had noticed. Omera’s smile slipped, and she forced it back into place.

Cara tilted her head. She wasn’t quite frowning.  _ You OK? _

Omera blinked rapidly, and nodded very slightly. Cara nodded, but she didn’t move backwards; standing like this, with the crowd so tightly pressed around them, Omera only needed to shift her balance onto her heels to lean back into Cara’s solid warmth. She took in one short breath, and then a second, and then she cheered and clapped with everyone else as Danae and Caben kissed and laughed and signed the register held out to them by the officiant. 

“All right, so what now?” Cara said, directly into her ear.

  
“We throw a party,” Omera replied. Caben and Danae’s closest friends, family and attendants had descended on them in shouts of joy and congratulations; the children dispersed from their little group, and Winta ran to Omera and threw her arms around her. 

“Nice,” Cara said. “Hey, kid, did you mind your manners?”

  
  
“Better than you did,” Winta said smartly, and Omera laughed half out of surprise. It had been so long since she’d heard Winta talk back to an adult other than herself, and the face Cara pulled and the way she ruffled Winta’s hair made Omera smile.

“I had questions,” Cara retorted. “Curiosity may have killed the lothcat but it didn’t get  _ me _ .”

“Not for lack of trying,” Winta whipped back, and Cara laughed too, bright and wicked. She flicked Winta’s ear lightly, and Winta shied away, but her grin didn’t fail. 

“Watch that mouth, Win, it’ll grow up to get you in trouble. Omera, can I help you with anything?”

“I - No, thank you, not right now.” Omera met Cara’s eyes fully. “I was just going to congratulate Caben and Danae. I think Aliyo wanted a hand with the spotchka vats, though.”   
  


“Okay. Well, let me know.” Cara’s fingers brushed hers again, very lightly, a tiny little reminder that someone else had noticed she was in pain, a tiny reminder that someone cared enough to call her on her suffering. Omera wasn’t sure if she loved it or she hated it.

“Later, maybe,” Omera’s traitorous mouth said, as if some part of her had already decided that she would be telling Cara things she had absolutely no intention of letting out, as if she weren’t perfectly well aware that this conversation was going to be overheard and wilfully misinterpreted by half the village.

Cara left, and Winta ran off to play with the other kids, and Omera put her smile back on her face and went to wish the bride and groom well.

  
  


The party, like the ceremony, went off without a hitch - if you excused the visitors who fell in the krill ponds. There were always a few. The weather stayed dry, so they kept the blinds rolled up on the bar and let laughter and music echo out. Omera roamed around the party, helping with the food, sitting and chatting with Yali, dancing a couple of rounds with Jorgan before discovering a need to be somewhere else, listening to the speeches and the songs. She set her fears about Winta’s future aside, watching the children dart around like krill; there was a brief moment of panic when the children rushed outside and there was a sudden splash, but it wasn’t Winta who fell in, and Cara - just as constantly in motion as Omera herself - hauled the kid out by the scruff of his neck and restored him to his parents before he could do more than squeak. Something that might have been serious turned into an excuse for a laugh, Cara’s glittering dark eyes catching Omera’s own, her amused smirk catching light amongst the other guests as she wiped her wet hands off on her shirt.

Omera wasn’t avoiding her. It was just that she was busy. There was so much to do - so many people to talk to. The registrar had to be kept royally entertained, and he was cranky and had views about off-worlders settling on Sorgan, so Omera had to smile prettily at him and say nothing rash and talk about her late husband who’d been born here, and listen attentively to his ramblings until someone else came along to divert his attention. Food for so many people, for so many meals, was a constant chore, and then there were the speeches to listen to, and the dancing - Omera hadn’t danced much for years, but people kept asking her, and it would be rude to refuse, so -

She saw the scuffle from across the room, as dusk fell and Stoke switched on the lights and turned on the solar spotlights they’d planted outside to let them shine into the night, glittering among the garlands, turning the slowly deepening sunset into a painter’s backdrop of gilt-edged clouds. The passing of time was beautiful, and also a strong indication that people had had time to drink too much spotchka. Which would explain the pair of young men starting to shove at each other.

If pressed, Omera might have admitted that she did not have a high opinion of spotchka. You could drink it. It got you drunk. Aged correctly, it wasn’t X-wing fuel. But it was also very easy to drink too much very quickly.

Omera excused herself, whirled out of the dance, and slipped round the edge of the dancefloor to the widening circle around the two men, only to find that it had contracted very quickly because Cara had grabbed each of them by an ear and hauled them outside. Omera followed her, and was privileged to witness one of them break free and try hazily to punch Cara. Omera kicked him as hard as she could in the back of the knee and watched him stagger and fall to one knee.

“Fucking behave,” Cara said, more irritable than anything else, and twisted the arm of the one she was still holding when he tried to wrench free as well. 

“What’s happening here?” Omera demanded.

“She grabbed us,” complained the one on the floor, trying to stagger back to his feet. Omera stepped on the ankle that was still resting on the floor, by way of a deterrent. She recognised neither of them, so that meant they were from Danae’s village; an imported quarrel.

“I meant before that. Why are the two of you fighting?” 

“Y’not the headman,” Cara’s prisoner announced.

  
Cara shook him. “She’s the person who’ll stop you getting in trouble if the pair of you put your big boy pants on and admit to what’s going on here.”

“Fuck you!”   
  


“You’re not my type,” Cara said very dryly, and Omera felt a smirk curl at her own lips.

“I think it’s time you explained yourselves,” Omera said, in the voice she used to cut through her daughter’s complaints, and listened patiently while a narrative emerged. It was a foolish boys’ quarrel over a girl; they were both very young, and too stupid to have realised that they needed to know what the girl in question wanted before moving further. Omera located their parents, and had Cara release the boys to their custody.

In the quiet after they’d gone, she met Cara’s rueful eye and couldn’t stop herself laughing.

Cara shook her head and looked away, grinning. “I don’t think I was ever that fucking dumb.”

“Are you sure?”

  
  
“I’ve done a lot of dumbfuck things for beautiful women, but I always checked they preferred me to my friends first,” Cara retorted, with a wink that was probably illegal in several galactic sectors and should have been illegal in several more.

Omera clapped a hand over her mouth to stop herself laughing out loud, and Cara looked down at her feet, still grinning.

There was a small, contented moment, and then Omera let out a breath and said: “I should check on Winta.”

  
  
“She’s fallen asleep,” Cara said. “Ate all the sugar Danae was handing out, ran around like a frenzied gundark for two hours, and now she’s crashed with some of the other kids.”

“Oh dear,” Omera said, somewhat muffled by the fact that she’d covered her face with both hands. “Where?” 

“I’ll show you.”

  
  
Omera followed Cara round to a quieter spot in one of the storage sheds, where a lot of coats and blankets had been lumped together and a number of children had fallen asleep on them. It wasn’t very late, but it had been a long day; Omera felt tired just looking at them. She found Winta, and tugged at her shoulder gently to wake her, but then Cara nudged her out of the way and scooped the little girl up. Omera’s breath caught slightly.

“She’s getting too heavy for me to lift,” she said softly.

“Kids grow up,” Cara replied. “But this one is pretty small. May as well let her sleep.” Winta murmured, almost as if she’d heard them, but then twisted her head against Cara’s shoulder and went trustfully limp.

Omera’s heart did something uncomfortable. Winta shouldn’t have remembered the events of her early life, but she was still rarely at ease with adults, and had been noticeably shy with their guests. Cara, though, she had taken to her heart. 

It was a shame Cara would very likely leave. And probably fairly soon.

Cara carried Winta all the way back to Omera’s house, and helped Omera take off Winta’s boots before stepping outside to let Omera tuck her in; it was a holiday, Omera thought, so Winta could probably live without brushing her teeth this once, and she only sang for Winta when Winta needed it to sleep. She kissed her daughter’s forehead, and closed the door behind her.

Cara was waiting out on the veranda, like she thought Omera might need extra privacy for something. Omera walked out to join her, and found her leaning against the wall, watching the party from a distance.

“Going well,” Cara observed.

“Yes.”

“Was your wedding like this?” 

Omera smiled without feeling it at the echo of Winta’s words. “No,” she said. “I met Winta’s father off-planet. I didn’t come here until after he was dead. We got married in a registry office.”   


  
“Traditional vows?”

Omera nodded. There were no lights on in her house, save the nightlight in Winta’s room, but in the light from the party and the full moon above she saw Cara turn her face towards her, the glitter of her eyes. “Afterwards,” she said. “We said them in front of all our friends and a lot of people neither of us knew. In a cantina. Couldn’t afford a private party.”   
  


Cara smiled. The light glinted off her teeth.

“I know -” Omera began, and then closed her mouth, finding the words had fled her, finding she wasn’t sure she wanted to say them, wasn’t sure she wanted to confront what Cara had noticed, wasn’t sure exactly what Cara had made of it.

“The third vow,” Cara said quietly. “It upset you?” 

Omera opened her mouth and closed it, and looked away.

“Love, compassion, and kindness,” she said, eventually, and then stopped for a long while. Cara waited, silent and still. Maybe she’d waited in troop transports like that, maybe there were graves of men who had tried and failed to outlast her; all Omera heard was patience.

“I don’t know if he stopped loving me,” Omera said. Her words had got stuck. She forced out: “But -”

Nothing further came out.

“Hey,” Cara said, and when Omera looked over she saw through vision that was sparkling and shattering that Cara was holding her arms open.

She took a single tentative step, and then another, and then Cara’s arms folded around her, and she pressed her forehead with the stupid band she hated into the top of Cara’s shoulder and bit the inside of her cheek until blood sprung hot and copper into her mouth. Cara had strong arms, as Omera already knew, strong arms and strong shoulders and she knew how to hold someone so they felt grounded, and after a minute Omera was able to lift her head, and lean it against Cara’s, and swallow the blood and breathe instead.

“Kinda wish he wasn’t dead,” Cara said, thoughtfully. Her embrace had loosened a bit as Omera relaxed, but she hadn’t let go. “I just want a word with him. Just a friendly word.”

Omera chuckled. The sound ripped and tore in her throat and came out pitiful.

“None of these guys know, huh.”

Omera shook her head. 

“Okay.” Cara loosened her grip on Omera, and Omera took that as the cue to step back a little; Cara’s eyes searched her face, and Cara reached up with light rough thumbs to smudge the tears on her cheeks away.

“You wanna come and dance?” Cara asked, quietly. “Forget about it?”

Omera shook her head. “I just want - I just want to be quiet for a bit.”

“You want me to stay?”

“I - No, you go and enjoy yourself.”

“Omera,” Cara pressed, one hand lightly curled around Omera’s elbow. “Do  _ you  _ want me to stay?”   
  
Omera reached for Cara’s hand, and wound her fingers with it as she peeled it off her elbow. “No. I just want a minute. I-” she hesitated. “I’ll - I’ll come and find you.”

“Okay,” Cara said again, and Omera found a weak smile for her.

  
“Thank you,” she said. “For noticing.”

Cara’s mouth curled slightly in a smile, and she nodded and squeezed Omera’s fingers before letting go and heading back to the party.

Omera sat down on the step, and watched Cara’s retreating figure until she blurred into the lights and the other people. And then Omera raised her eyes to the stars, breathed in, breathed out, and repeated to herself the  _ Resol’nare _ .

  
  


After a little while she got up and went back to the party, and found Cara being talked at by a pretty woman younger than either of them. Cara was leaning against one of the bar’s pillars, and seemed to be listening with half an ear; but her eyes caught Omera as soon as she approached the party, and brightened.

“Excuse me,” Omera heard Cara say to the woman clearly trying (and failing) to pick her up, and watched as Cara threaded her way through the crowd to join her.

“Feeling better?” Cara asked.

Omera nodded, and then - taking a deep breath, feeling brave - she held out her hands. “I think you offered me a dance,” she said.


	4. Chapter 4

Cara woke up the next morning without the hangover she would normally have expected to have after a party that had ended in the small hours, and with the faint remnants of some very vivid dreams. She cracked an eye open, and realised through the quality of the light in the main room of Omera's house that it was only just dawn. She couldn't have been asleep for more than a few hours.

No real need to get up, then. She turned onto her back and closed her eyes, trying to recapture the fragments of the dream. They were slipping through her fingers, though, as insubstantial as fog; a figure with Omera's smile and ready laugh, and Omera's weight in her arms, except this time  _ not _ in tears and rigid with suppressed pain.

Cara grimaced. It really was a shame something else had got to Winta's still-unnamed dad before she'd had the chance to give him a piece of her mind. And possibly an even greater shame that Omera had carried his failings on her shoulders alone, and settled among his people, who - however many years she'd lived with them, however much she did for them, however closely she stuck to their customs - still saw her as an outsider.

Such a waste, Cara thought, and pulled the blanket over her head and tried to think of something different.

She thought of something different to the point of falling asleep for another hour, until a vague sense that she should be up and doing coupled with the awareness that Winta was awake chased her out of bed. She collared Winta and got her to brush her teeth, and found something for both of them to eat as a snack to tide them both over to a full meal. Omera had mentioned something about breakfast that was important, something that stuck hazily in Cara's memory from the short walk back to the house the previous night, shoulders bumping against each other comfortingly, Cara never looking where she was going because she was always looking at Omera, who kept looking back in tiny knife-blade glances and then looking down at her feet. It had been too dark to see if she was blushing. Cara hoped so.

Cara was fucked if she remembered anything Omera had said about breakfast other than that it happened, though - she had been somewhat more focused on the elegant line of Omera's jaw, and how much she would have liked to have been kissing the pulse points beneath it - so instead of getting a proper meal she stuck to a snack out on the veranda with a hot drink. Winta was wide awake and full of beans, and Cara listened while the kid chattered and leaned her elbows on her knees, watching the village wake up. 

The sun was all the way up - granted it was behind a whole bunch of clouds, but it was up - when Omera put in an appearance. She looked like she had slept badly, but there was a lightness to her that had been missing for the past several days, a lack of tension. When Cara thought about it, she’d been more tightly wound than usual for a while, even when Cara managed to make her laugh or smile. It wasn’t strange that Cara hadn’t recognised it for what it was - until she’d actually asked Omera, she’d thought the crack in her armour during the ceremony was down to grief for a  _ happy  _ marriage cut short. It was kind of weird that she had picked up on it at all, but hell, when you live with an enigma you learn to pick up the clues. Cara was more puzzled that apparently no-one in the village had noticed, since they’d all known Omera for years.

“Morning sunshine,” Cara said, grinning over the top of her cup of tea. Winta bounced to her feet and threw her arms enthusiastically around her mother.

Omera rolled her eyes, but with a smile. “You should have woken me up. It’s late.”

“It’s a holiday. Relax.”

“Yeah, mama,” Winta said, hugging Omera in a way that suggested she was affectionately trying to burrow her way through her mother’s diaphragm. “Cara said we should let you sleep.”

“Oh, well. If Cara said it.” Omera sat down on the step next to Cara, and tugged Winta down with her to sit on her lap. 

“You mentioned something about breakfast,” Cara said, leaning her head back against one of the supporting pillars. “I forgot what you were talking about, but I remembered that much.”   
  


“The bride’s family prepares breakfast,” Omera supplied. “And they come round to invite us to it. Then they leave after breakfast.”

“Danae’s staying here?”   
  
“For a few months, until their house in her town is actually built.” 

"Right." Cara, who had paid very little attention to the discussion about Caben and Danae's future, stretched her legs out and shut her eyes. "So basically what you're telling me is: I don't have to do anything right now."

"That's right." There was a faint undercurrent of amusement in Omera's voice; Cara felt her own lips curl in response. "Winta, I think you could have left Cara to sleep too." Winta giggled, and Cara smiled and opened her eyes.

"Nah, I was awake anyway." Cara stretched. "But if Jorgan does something f- something dumb today he can pull himself out of it without help from me. I'm on strike."

Omera smiled. "No-one will try to get anything serious done today." She kissed the side of Winta's head and smoothed her daughter's hair down absently. "We might go foraging; I feel like mushrooms. If you want to come."

"Sure, but you'll have to tell me what's poisonous."

“I am also eating this meal. If you try to pick something poisonous I’ll throw it back.” The movement around the centre of the village became purposeful; Omera stared at it for a second and then patted Winta on the shoulder and told her to get dressed, before getting off and dusting down the skirt of the loose nightdress she was wearing. It was the only item Cara had ever seen her wear that wasn’t blue - what the fuck was with this village and blue? The krill, the alcohol, the attire - and Cara wondered, just for a second, if she’d had it since before she’d even moved here.

“Do I have to do something now,” Cara enquired. Yellow was a good colour on Omera. That kind of soft yellow. There was probably a word for it. 

“If you’re fine with turning up to breakfast dressed like that, then no,” Omera said. “But you might crack a few people’s brains.”   
  
“Oh, okay, it’s like that, is it.” Cara heaved herself off the step, taking her tea with her. “Pretty dress, by the way.”   
  


“It’s my pyjamas.”   
  
“Cute pyjamas. Same difference.” 

“Yellow was always my favourite colour,” Omera said, and shut herself back into her room to change into yet more blue.

Not the headband, though, Cara realised when she came out. Which was good, because Omera very clearly hated that thing with everything she had. 

Omera pulled her hair back off her face, and combed Winta’s hair and plaited a section back; Cara tidied her own, and then held out the blue length of braid to Omera. 

“Can you help me fix this again?” she said. “It didn’t survive the night.”   
  
True. It had come loose when she was walking back with Omera, and Omera had tucked the trailing end behind her ear and smiled. Cara had left it in, and it had fallen out and disappeared down the back of the daybed. 

“Of course,” Omera said, as if she hadn’t noticed Cara making a complete fool of herself last time. At least Cara managed to control her breathing and act  _ normal  _ this time, and not, for the love of the Force, say  _ don’t stop  _ to a woman who was just trying to braid her hair in peace.

Somewhere, whatever time it was on Yavin IV, Kes Dameron had probably woken up and howled with laughter. Cara would have to ensure he never, ever found out what a fucking fool she was making of herself over a pair of pretty brown eyes and a quick eye with a rifle. At least she was very clear about her type.

Omera did have nice hands, though, and a delicate touch. Probably not necessary for krill farming, but really good when she had her fingers in your hair.

  
  


Breakfast was great. Cara paid no attention to any of it. She just sat next to Omera and followed her lead, and stopped Winta from starting a fight with a kid who definitely deserved it (points for spirit, but not for timing). 

“So have you been living here long?” said someone from the other village town thing, wherever and whatever it was, Cara had not been paying attention. They were eyeing her with fascination.

“Uh, no. Couple of months? Winta, I swear to f- Kid, stop messing with me, your mom will be back any minute now and she’ll kill us both.”

Winta giggled and dug her spoon back into her porridge… thing. The porridge itself was nice, kind of nutty and creamy. Cara reserved judgement about the tower of increasingly unhinged toppings Winta had piled onto hers, though.

“Ah, so you moved to live with Omera.”

Where the hell did people get their ideas. Probably from the fact that Cara had moved into Omera’s house, though not, alas, into her bed. “No, that was incidental. I showed up to chase off a couple of freeloading as- uh-”

“I know what an asshole is,” Winta announced.

“Yeah, I’m sure you do, Win, you act like one often enough.” (Winta giggled again, totally unaffected.) “Anyway, they had a small raider problem, turned out to be a large raider problem, me and a friend dealt with it, the friend had to move on and I stuck around. It’s nice here. Peaceful.”   
  
“Oh. I see! I see,” said the visitor. What they saw Cara was not privileged to figure out and did not really care. 

“Yeah, we’re lucky to have Cara around,” Stoke chimed in, and Cara bit down on a sigh before it could burst into fruition. “She ran out right in front of this massive Imperial walker, shot out the viewport like -”   
  
“Okay, first of all, it wasn’t quite like that,” Cara cut him off, before either Winta’s or the visitor’s eyes could get any wider. Omera came back from her trip to the bathroom, and sat back on the bench, giving Cara a curious look. “Second of all, what I did do was probably the stupidest thing I have ever done in my life, and believe me, it has competition.”   
  
“But very brave, though,” Omera said, in a honeyed voice that bore more resemblance to the singing Cara still hadn’t heard again than to the raw _ we’re not leaving _ that had originally nailed Cara’s feet to this stupid village and kept her here.

Cara ran out of brain before she could find her third sentence and had to locate some more. “Maybe. The two have a lot in common. Third of all, though. I had a lot of help.” 

“It was a shame Mando had to move on,” Stoke said. He was leaning on the table next to Cara, right on the edge of her personal space, and in a different kind of locale Cara would just have accidentally-on-purpose backhanded him into the nearest table. But then, in that kind of locale, he would have been getting into her space with the intention of starting a fight.

  
“He was worried about his son,” Omera said. “Any parent would have done it.”   
  
Wasn’t that interesting. Cara filed that away for future reference - especially since Omera hadn’t fled Sorgan with Winta at the first, or even the third, sign of trouble - and finished her mouthful before speaking. “I meant Omera, too. Haven’t met anyone who could shoot like that in a while.” 

“You can  _ shoot _ ?” said the visitor.

“Best in the village!” said Stoke.

  
“Mando taught me,” Omera demurred, which was at best overly modest and at worst a flat-out lie.

“Oh come on -” Stoke began.

Cara steamrollered him before he could show up the lie. “Natural talent,” she said, and watched Omera turn pink about the cheeks.

“I see,” repeated the visitor.

  
  


Cara was glad when they were all gone and things started getting tidied up. She helped with the heavy lifting for a bit, and then peeled off to find Omera, who had left Winta and her long-distance lessons with the other kids of a similar age, so they could all catch up. There was a lot of whining. Cara snorted; she would have tried to get out of class too, in their shoes.

Good luck to the guy supervising them, was all  _ she _ had to say. Even Omera looked harassed when she joined Cara on the edge of the woods.

  
“If we’re out of earshot I won’t know when they start creating havoc, and it won’t be my problem,” she said, leading Cara quickly between the trees. There were paths; Cara knew them reasonably well, after weeks of patrolling around the village. But she had no idea where exactly Omera was taking them.

Cara snorted. “You should have seen me at school.”

“I don’t need telling you were trouble.”

“ _ So _ much trouble,” Cara said. “Always too loud, or too much sass, or starting fights, or skipping classes, if I thought they didn’t have a point.” She grinned at Omera. “You would have been the perfect student.”

“I wish.” Omera stared off into the trees. “I left school at fourteen.” 

Cara nearly missed a step and blamed it on a tree root. “That’s young.”

“I just didn’t have the option to carry on.”

“You could pick it up again now, if you wanted,” Cara suggested. Yet another tiny piece of information that added up to a giant gaping black hole in what she knew of Omera’s life, another little glimpse at the person behind the barricade of perfect Sorgan citizen, the individual who loved the colour yellow and sang the  _ Vode An _ to her nine-year-old and cried over a dead husband who’d stopped being compassionate and kind. 

“I keep meaning to. There never seems to be time.”   
  
“You keep yourself busy.”

“I’ve never not been busy.” Omera stopped, and looked around, then knelt down by Cara’s feet and pushed away the undergrowth. “Okay, here. This is what we’re looking for.”   
  
Cara looked down at the top of Omera’s head, and then crouched next to her. Omera pointed out clusters of mottled purple mushrooms.

“Those look fucking evil, Omera.”

“They taste great. And they won’t kill you. They use the dried ones in spotchka, and we’d know if you were allergic to that by now.”

“Fine, I’ll put my life in your hands,” Cara said, more lightly than she felt. “And my digestion.” 

Omera snorted, and took out a short-bladed knife to cut the mushrooms from the earth and slip them into the bag she was carrying. “We’ll need a couple of bags. Do you have a kn- do you have a  _ clean  _ knife?”

“Not by food prep standards, no,” Cara said, and enjoyed the eyeroll she got when Omera handed her a second knife and a loosely woven blue fabric bag.

“Look at the base of the trees. And mind out for the ponds - it gets slippery around here, and if you fall in, I’m not going to be able to get you out again.”

“I can get me out again,” Cara pointed out. She’d been told that falling into the water was a bad idea, but no-one had specified why, and she hadn’t asked beyond noting the danger. She could swim just fine. Unless this was some kind of Venusian flytrap situation.

“Almost certainly not,” Omera said. “Trust me on this one. There’s a reason I left Winta behind.”

_ I sort of hoped you wanted to spend time alone with me _ , Cara absolutely did not say. “Now I’m curious.”

“I’ll show you what I mean when we come across a good spot,” Omera promised, but she was obviously distracted, fully occupied by her search for mushrooms. 

They had probably been searching for half an hour - and Omera had filled her bag of mushrooms and started adding to Cara’s, because she, unlike Cara, knew what she was doing - when they came across the sunken pool and Omera grabbed her by the waist.

  
“Is this what counts as a good spot?” Cara said, hyperaware both of Omera’s grip and the wet, muddy ground that would have dumped her on her ass in a deceptively calm-looking chalky blue pool. 

“One of them,” Omera said. “So, all the pools round here are thermal, but some are much hotter than others. Some are cool enough to swim in, but all of those are marked. Some will boil your skin off your bones, and the ones that are in between have teckfish in.”

“What?” 

Omera let go of her waist, which was obviously a disappointment. “You brought jerky for a snack, didn’t you? Lend me some?”

“I’m assuming I’m not getting it back,” Cara observed, digging in her pocket and handing over a strip of jerky.

“No, unless you want to fight a carnivorous fish the length of your torso for it.” Omera tossed the jerky underarm over the surface of the pool, and the moment it skimmed the water a massive blotched yellow and brown fish with a protruding lower jaw erupted from the depths, snatched it up, and disappeared. “There are a lot of them down there. You can’t see because of the colour of the water. They fight and eat each other until the biggest ones have no competition, and they’ll eat whatever’s got meat on it and is stupid enough to fall in, alive or not.” 

Cara’s jaw was hanging loose. She shut it. “O-kay. How do you know which ones have teckfish in?”

  
“The pools need to be a certain temperature for them to survive.” Omera shrugged. “I never asked how they figured that out in the first place.”   
  
“I thought you were all about knowledge.”

“I’m always curious.” Omera turned away from the pool and met Cara’s eyes, and Cara was struck, again, that they were the same height, that when Omera looked her in the eye she never flinched or held back. “But I really just didn’t want to know.”

“Fair.” Cara looked down into the bag of mushrooms. “Is this enough?”    
  
“For three of us, no. I sometimes think Winta has hollow legs.” Omera scrambled up a bank, and forged off into the woods. “This way.”   
  
Cara followed her.

  
  


The next few days were hell. Not because anything showed up to trouble them - Cara kept kicking around the woods, looking for raiders, but none materialised - but because Winta suddenly couldn't sleep, and her temper had taken a turn for the worse as a consequence. It happened after upheaval in her routine, and there wasn't much to be done about it except reassure her and wait it out, Omera said. She’d sounded exhausted, and there were tell-tale purpling shadows under her eyes, but her voice left no room for argument. 

She also tried to trade with Cara so Cara wouldn't be sleeping in the main room of the house and therefore woken every time Winta had a nightmare or got up looking for comfort. Cara refused. Quite apart from the fact that sleeping in Omera's bed without her would be a weird sort of torture that she had no intention of putting herself through, she thought Omera needed what sleep she got. And it seemed vaguely ridiculous, when she lived in the same house, to watch out for the kid only when the threats were things she could punch. Cara knew all about this kind of nightmare, and the way it stole all your peace.

One very early morning, when Winta had had a record-breakingly shit night and eventually fallen into an exhausted sleep on Cara's daybed, Omera looked at Cara and visibly decided neither of them would be able to get back to sleep even if Cara's bed hadn't been occupied by a traumatised little girl. She put the kettle on for caf in perfect silence, and they both sat outside on the veranda, watching the chilly charcoal grey light turn slowly to dawn, listening to birdsong, getting eaten alive by mosquitoes.

"Is it always this bad?" Cara said. 

Omera nodded. "Change has always made it hard for her to sleep. Since she was a baby. Things happened - she doesn't remember them." Omera fell silent, and sipped at her caf. "I hope she doesn't remember them. But it got a lot worse when the raiders showed up."

“There are people she could talk to,” Cara said. “Who deal with… this kind of thing. Especially in kids. I know the Republic’s got programmes for kids affected by the war.”

“I’m not a Republic citizen,” Omera said. “Neither is Winta.” There was a faint grim edge to her voice that Cara didn’t quite recognise, and Cara looked sideways at her for a minute, before a mosquito distracted her and she slapped it to death.

“Some of the aid workers I ran across -” _ completely terrified _ , Cara substituted, in the peace of her own mind - “specialised in stuff like that too. I know it’s not just the Republic they deal with.”

“I know. I applied.” Omera sighed and stretched her legs out before her, crossing them at the ankle. “It might be possible to get her talking with a counsellor. Distance only, though. There aren’t the resources for mental health on Sorgan, and…” 

Cara waited until she was sure Omera had stopped talking to open her mouth, and then realised Omera was struggling with her words and closed it again to give her time.

  
“We have been - safe, here,” Omera said.

“ _ Real _ safe,” Cara said. “You nearly got shot up by a bunch of fucking incompetents with knock-off Imperial heavy artillery.”

“We were completely safe for years before that,” Omera said, in a voice which did not invite argument. “It’s quiet. It’s peaceful. This way Winta has a connection to her father, to his culture.”

“Yeah, I’ve been wondering about that; where are your in-laws?”   
  
“He had no brothers or sisters, and his parents died not long after I met him. Yali is his aunt, though.” Omera sipped at her caf. “She was very kind, when we first arrived.”

Cara knew a deflection when she heard one. She let it pass.

“You never told me why you came here,” Omera said, and Cara winced. Okay, so maybe not pursuing that deflection had been a mistake, since it now looked as if the other option was telling the honest truth about herself.

Strangely it never occurred to her to  _ just fucking lie _ .

“Needed somewhere quiet,” Cara said. “There’s a chain code out on me. And an arrest warrant.”

Omera squinted critically into the middle distance. “Why?”   
  
“Why the chain code? Or the arrest warrant?”

“Either,” Omera said dryly.

“The chain code’s not interesting. I pissed a few people off. Didn’t do anything spectacular.” Cara took a gulp of her caf. “The arrest warrant’s New Republic.”   
  
Omera was silent. Cara put her cup of caf down on her lap and looked out at the world around her, listening for movement, watching for villagers up and about. It was still barely dawn, and no-one was moving.

“After the war ended,” Cara began, “it just… it didn’t end clean. You know that, or there wouldn’t have been a fucking AT-ST in your back garden. People who shouldn’t have got away with shit… got away with it. Always the big guys, never the little ones. I beat the shit out of their minions and kidnapped them for justice, and they walked free with an apology from the Provisional Senate.” Cara looked down at her hands, and ran a thumb over the rim of the cup. “The brass put us on peacekeeping stuff. Managing riots and shit. Close protection. I’m all right as a bodyguard, but I knew the kind of ex-Imp scum they kept putting me on to protect, the kind of people who said they were never really Imperial, but they lied… bunch of lying bastards. As for the peacekeeping, I mean, fuck, I’m not police. That’s not what I’m for. It’s not what I’m good at, it’s not what I should be doing. I’m a kriffing _dropper_ , I’m there for - shock and awe-type shit. I can’t do police work. I shouldn’t do police work.”  
  
Fucking hell, Cara thought, this is a lot of words in one go. But they kept spilling out nonetheless.

“So I quit,” she said slowly. “And then I figured out… there were other people who knew the same shit as me, about the same fucking Imperial  _ lackeys _ , and they were still getting away with it… And people approached me, and asked me if I wanted to do something about it. I did.”

“Fatally?” Omera asked.

“No.” Cara drained the cup of caf. “I didn’t want them dead. I didn’t think that would fix  _ shit _ . No. I wanted the truth to come out.” She laughed, sharp and bitter, and cut it off halfway out of fear she’d wake Winta. “It didn’t. They got off. Cleared of all charges. None of the evidence, none of the confessions - it didn’t matter.”

“Despite everything they’d done.”   
  
Cara looked sideways, and found that Omera was staring straight back at her. Those clear, unreadable brown eyes were full of something that Cara shrank from instinctively; she dropped her gaze, and realised Omera had laid her hand on the decking, palm up and open, an invitation. She covered it with her own, and felt Omera link their hands with those long, thin, strong fingers, so tight Cara couldn’t easily break her grip, and didn’t want to.

“Yeah,” Cara said roughly. “Despite everything they’d done. Those fucking bastards.”   
  
“Thank you for trying,” Omera said, and did not let go.


	5. Chapter 5

The rest of the day was subdued. Winta woke heavy-eyed, quiet and grumpy; Omera let her off school, and she spent most of the day sitting beside the krill ponds, tinkering with droid parts on Yali's instructions. The whole village was slightly off, not because they understood what was wrong with Winta - although they'd have to be unforgivably dense to have no idea at all - but because the weather had gone heavy, hot and humid and sweaty, and the air pressure was dropping so fast Cara could feel it. Some time after lunchtime the great grey clouds started piling up in the sky, and people started to move to get things indoors, cover vulnerable machinery, bring in laundry. Cara scrambled onto the roof to check the patch she and Omera had put up there more than a month ago now, reasoning that if the storm got as bad as it seemed likely to then the patched roof might be vulnerable; but the patch was still there, tight and waterproof and unlikely to shift without major force being applied to it.    
  


Cara sat up on the roof and watched lightning flicker in the far distance, out over the trees. There was no wind at all, and the only sound besides the occasional call and response below was the raucous cawing of unsettled birds. 

“Cara? Can you help me with the dryi - Cara?”   
  


“Up here,” Cara yelled.

Omera stepped out several feet beyond the eaves. “What are you doing up there?”

“Checking on the roof.” Cara slung the toolkit she had brought with her over her shoulder, slid down to the edge of the roof, twisted, and dropped neatly to the ground, slowing her fall with a catch on the gutter and landing lightly on the balls of her feet.

  
“Show-off,” Omera said, unimpressed but not unamused. Cara shrugged one shoulder and half-grinned, covering her embarrassment. Why the hell Omera always saw through her - why the hell she’d even done that, it was a stupid trick - “I know you didn’t get those tattoos for jumping off roofs. Come and help me with the drying racks.”

Cara dumped the toolkit on the veranda and joined Omera in lifting the racks, heavily laden with krill, and carrying them into a barn some of the older children were swarming over, pulling down shutters and stacking crates away to make space. “Looks like a hell of a storm coming in.” She could hear the faintest rumbles of thunder now, echoing under her feet like the approach of AT-ATs over the horizon. 

“Yes,” Omera said. “We have a few, every year. The ones you were out in were showers by comparison.”   
  
“Yeah, I’ll be staying indoors. Any idea when it’s going to hit?” 

Latest rack taken indoors, Omera stepped out under the sky and squinted up at the clouds. “It’s moving very slowly,” she said at last, “and it’s a long way away - right now it’s a long way away. It might not hit before this evening.”   
  
“Huh.”   
  
“Or the wind might pick up and catch us all out in the open,” Omera concluded.

“Right,” Cara said. “And these last… how long?”   
  
“This one will last all night.” Omera frowned. “And hopefully not flood anything. We redug the drainage canals last year but it’s still a lot of standing water. You put your locker off the ground, didn’t you?”   
  
“Yeah, but I’m going to put it  _ higher  _ off the ground,” Cara said, heading in that direction. “Back in a minute, yell if you need me.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Omera said, keeping pace. “You can’t lift it by yourself. I’ll help you.”   
  
Cara let that go and herself into the building they were now using to store the weapons, since the bar was officially back in service. It was functionally a shed, and although it was well-built, with pilings properly sunk into the damp ground and a solid roof, Cara knew the odd doubt about leaving the locker in there. There still hadn’t been time to make anything purpose-built; the village was gearing up for a new harvest of the fast-growing krill, and given the way their livelihoods had been repeatedly fucked up by raiders, they needed that very badly.

“Think this will hold?” she asked, kicking one of the load-bearing corner pillars. It didn’t budge, which would have increased Cara’s confidence level if she thought a kick from her was at all comparable to a major thunderstorm. She was never going to forget the havoc that the storms on Yavin IV used to cause. Still did cause, going by the busted roads last time she’d dropped in on Kes and his family, before she’d moved on in advance of her arrest warrant. Their only saving grace was that they made it difficult for Imps to scan the planet for lifesigns.

“Yes,” Omera said. “The roof is good, the floor is good, the water would have to rise a long way to get in here. I had Jorgan go over the place myself, and he might be a bit gullible but he’s the best builder in the village. He said it would hold no matter what.” She caught Cara’s eye. “But we could get them higher off the floor. I’ll go and fetch some crates.”

The storm broke late in the day. The villagers had continued harvesting - Cara wasn’t a farmgirl, but Caben had explained that the storm would stir up silt in the bottom of the ponds, meaning they’d need time to settle and all that the krill that came out afterwards would have to be cleaned much more intensively and time-consumingly than usual - but with one eye on the sky at all times, and an ear out for thunder. The children had been sent inside to study, all except Winta, who didn’t want to let Omera out of her sight and didn’t want to go back into her house alone. The villagers had lost their shyness about asking Cara to do things by now; Cara helped out where she could, and was kept thoroughly busy until the first truly clear snap of lightning came and the first drops of rain began to fall. Cara pulled Danae straight out of the krill pond one-handed and turned to see where Omera and Winta had gone to.

They hadn’t gone anywhere. Well, Omera was trying to get Winta to go indoors while Omera finished something, and Winta was refusing; the rain began to fall in earnest, and Omera grabbed her own head like she had a headache - a display of exasperation so uncharacteristic Cara went over to see what was wrong. What was wrong was that there were a number of baskets of krill that needed taking inside, and Omera needed to get that done, and she shouldn’t take Winta with her, with the storm coming overhead.

“I’ll do it,” Cara yelled, over the rising wind. “Get inside.”

She didn’t catch Omera’s thanks; she just grabbed the baskets and headed to the barn as quickly as possible, and then came back for the remainder. The wind was already ripping at the tops of the trees, the thunder rumbling in the air, and Cara was strongly tempted to just dump the baskets and go. But the stupid things went rotten if they didn’t dry on the racks, apparently, so then she had to help sort that out -

Well, she didn’t have to do any of this. She wasn’t under any kind of obligation. She could just have left when she and Mando had realised the Klatooinians had Imperial armour. She should have just cleared out and gone for the quiet life, except, Cara thought, eyeing up the rain as she left the barn, this  _ was  _ the quiet life.

The quiet life involved a lot more rain and mud than she’d anticipated.

She made a run for the house and arrived on the veranda already soaked from head to foot, just in time to witness Winta, dressed in pyjamas and sitting up in bed, demanding  _ the song _ . It didn’t take a genius to figure out which song, even though it had been three weeks since Cara had moved in with Omera and she’d still never heard the Vode An again, and even though the way Winta snapped her mouth shut and stared at Cara suggested she’d been raised to treat it as a deadly secret.

“Don’t mind me,” Cara said, sitting down on the floor to take her boots off, and dropping them on the mat with Omera’s and Winta’s.

“It’s a secret,” Winta hissed to her mother, in a tone she obviously thought was very stealthy. It was not.

“Bet you a bag of sweets I know the words,” Cara replied, taking her coat off.

“I’ll take that bet,” Omera said dryly. “There are not a lot of people left in the galaxy who sing our song.”

That was fair. Of the millions of clones who had left Kamino, Cara’s educated guess was that perhaps a few thousand had made it to the end of the Galactic Civil War. Scattered across the galaxy, many of them would never have seen another brother again. Those with families must be few indeed, and when you considered that Omera had no siblings and never mentioned her parents, it seemed very likely she’d been cut off from anyone who could have sung with her. 

“I might not bet  _ you _ sweets,” Cara said, unable to resist. Omera’s eyebrows twitched. “A lot of the ones who do still sing it ended up with the Rebellion. Who do you think taught me to do more impressive things than jump off roofs?”

Winta looked confused and suspicious. Omera’s face had gone that very specific kind of still that meant she was working on not giving something away. Cara wrung her wet hair out in the kitchen sink, and let them think. 

“Prove it,” Winta said eventually.

“You’re going to regret my singing voice,” Cara warned her, but cleared her throat and wracked her brains for the lyrics. “Uh.  _ Kote! Kandosii sa ka'rta, Vode an - Coruscanta a'den mhi, Vode an. Bal kote, darasuum kote, Jorso'ran kando a tome _ .”

Winta’s jaw had dropped. Cara winked at her. “I told you so,” she said. “Let your mom sing. Her voice is prettier than mine.”

“Okay,” Winta said, sounding a bit stunned. When Cara managed to look at Omera’s face, she looked equally stunned - and frightened, too, in a way that made Cara wish she’d never said anything. “But it’s a secret. It’s a secret, you can’t tell anyone.”   
  
“I know,” Cara said, talking to the mother more than to the child. “I won’t tell anyone. Ever. I promise.”

Omera nodded slowly, and then got up and closed the sliding door to Winta’s room. Cara didn’t even try to pretend that didn’t fucking hurt. 

She should just have kept her  _ godsdamn  _ mouth shut. Old Blitz had given her enough shit for it since the day she’d shown up fresh off Alderaan, and she should have had the decency to remember.

Cara put the kettle on and wondered how the fuck this was going to go. 

By the time Omera had finished singing - and some other quiet conversation, that Cara couldn’t hear and didn’t try to - Cara had changed into dry shorts, a t-shirt, and a clean hooded jumper, and made two cups of tea. She was sitting on the daybed, pretending to be absorbed in a datapad she’d hardly bothered to turn on for weeks, when Omera reappeared, and closed the door to Winta’s room quietly behind her. 

“Is that for me?” she said, quite softly, nodding at the cup on the kitchen table.

“If you want it.” She looked less freaked out, Cara thought. Hoped.

Omera went and shut herself in her room. Cara bit on the inside of her cheek before she could do anything stupid like sigh, and glared at her datapad. The rain poured down on the roof, and the blinds and mosquito net whispered with the draughts.

Omera’s door reopened, and she reappeared; Cara looked up at her and blinked stupidly, then bit her tongue before she could do anything dumb like open her mouth and comment. Omera had changed into the same yellow nightdress she’d worn before, and had a dark blue wrap around her shoulders; she had taken her hair down and brushed it out the way she did before sleeping. But she was out here. 

Omera went over to the table and picked up her cup of tea, then looked at Cara. Cara, who thought her brain might have short-circuited, made space for her on the daybed, and was even more shocked when Omera walked over and sat down next to her, careful not to spill her cup of tea. Cara put her datapad down, and looked sideways at Omera’s inscrutable face.

“I’m sorry,” Cara said, without really meaning to let the words out. “I’m sorry. I should have found a better way to tell you I’d guessed. About your family, I mean. Your dad.”   
  
Omera said nothing for a while. Cara’s heart took up residence somewhere at the top of her throat, but she made herself wait until Omera spoke. Omera sighed and took a gulp of her tea, and then said: “Have you told anyone?”   
  


“No,” Cara said immediately.

“Good.” Omera said, and looked down at her mug.

“You never told Mando.” 

Omera shook her head. “You never know with Mandalorians.” She snorted. “You never know with anyone - but… Mandalorians are jealous of what they see as their culture and theirs alone. Clones have never been allowed to be a part of it.”

“You kept trying to take his helmet off.”

There was a long pause. “I know I shouldn’t have.”

Another pause, in which Cara couldn’t say that was  _ wrong _ . Mando was an odd one; fundamentally reliable, but he had his little ways, and was as entitled to them as anyone else. His conviction that he couldn’t take his helmet off, or allow it to be taken off, in front of another person, was fixed. So no. Omera probably shouldn’t have been giving him sweet smiles and telling him sweeter nothings to try to get the helmet off, even if her tastes ran to heavily armed and equally heavily reserved bounty hunters.

“I thought -” Omera paused, and took another gulp of tea, and then said: “I thought he might be… like me.”

“Some clonetrooper’s son?” 

“Hiding,” Omera said, which was not a negative.

Cara paused to think about that. Mando didn't sound or move like any of the few clonetroopers she’d ever met, but if he’d been raised by Mandalorians who weren’t off Kamino, he wouldn’t have done. He’d have echoed them. “He said it was a Mandalorian thing. Well, no, he said  _ this is the way _ .” 

“I don’t remember that line from the  _ Resol'nare _ ,” Omera said. 

“Isolated groups can get pretty hardcore about their traditions,” Cara said. “Or adapt them. You don’t wear armour.”   
  
“ _ Cuy’e beskariise _ ,” Omera said, like this was something that had been said to her often, and that she had repeated back to herself over many years. 

“I mostly know the swearwords,” Cara said. “And a few stock phrases.”

“I said there’s more than one kind of armour,” Omera said.

Cara digested that.

“I haven’t spoken Mando’a around anyone except Winta since she was born,” Omera said, after a while. “And then only in secret. Nobody knows. The Empire…”   
  
For the Empire, Cara was aware, every free clone was a deserter. And every clone was a product. It wasn’t hard to draw the line between that and Omera’s fear of discovery. Whether the Empire would have conscripted her or killed her was anyone’s guess, and it wasn’t a roll of the dice Cara would have cared to make.

Cara joined some dots. “Not even Winta’s dad?” 

Omera went very still, and Cara remembered:  _ I don’t know if he stopped loving me - _

“Forget I asked,” she said.

“No,” Omera said. “No, I… I did tell him. After Winta was born. I wanted to speak Mando’a to her.”

Cara waited.

  
“He thought the same things about clones that people always do,” Omera said. She stared down at her hands in her lap for a second, then lifted her head and drained the cup of tea. “Flesh droids. Not even people. You know the sort of thing. He made me promise I’d keep it a secret, forever, even from Winta, and he told me I had to stop target shooting - because if I was too good - someone might - guess.” She swallowed. Her stare had gone eagle-fierce and golden, fixed on the cupboards across the room. “I didn’t feel like I had a choice. I didn’t have any family left or anywhere to go and he had my only papers, and the only reason I had a job was because I was with him. He was hired on as a pilot, I cooked for the crew. And he promised me he’d look after me.”

Cara felt her jaw tighten until it creaked.

“He was always good with Winta,” Omera concluded, one tiny word in favour of the defence. 

“Yeah?” 

Omera nodded. “I… didn’t keep my promise, though.” She fell silent, and Cara passed her the second, half-drunk cup of tea. “He caught me singing for Winta. She was… about one.”

Cara held her breath.

“He hit me,” Omera said. Her voice had gone dead quiet and small like Cara had never heard it. “Just once. Never again. I made sure he never caught me again.”

Cara let her breath out, controlled an immediate burst of rage, and tried to find words to comfort Omera. But Omera was gone in a flurry of movement that cracked with the thunder above, taking the cups to the table, and digging out a bottle of something from one of the cupboards. She splashed a careless inch into each cup, and brought them back.

Cara sipped hers and coughed on it. “That’s  _ not  _ spotchka.” She’d had worse spacer’s moonshine, but she wasn’t sure when.   
  
“No. I brought it with me. Keeping hasn’t improved it.” Omera sipped on her own very slowly, and then said: “Nobody knows this at all.”

“Yeah?” Cara said softly, when she didn’t continue. 

“There was… a riot,” Omera said. “On Hays Minor.” She sipped at the moonshine again. “Which is where we were living at the time. I… There had been a lot of unrest, but - We were caught up in it.” A third sip. “I got away, but Yoser got - tripped, I guess, I didn’t see, I heard him shout and then I turned and he was already on the ground.” She stared at her cup and then knocked back its entire contents. “I’ve never told anyone else this.”   
  
“You don’t have to tell me.”

“No. I want to.” Omera put her cup down. “I had a blaster and a clear shot at the stormtrooper who killed Yoser. An easy shot. I could have stopped him. I didn’t.”

Cara reached out for Omera’s hand. Omera looked at Cara’s hand like it was a foreign object, but then took it tentatively, and held on.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Cara said. “And you don’t have to feel bad because the man who hit you got on the wrong end of a buckethead. It’s happened to plenty of better men, take it from me.”

“I  _ chose  _ to let him die.”

“You chose to keep yourself and your kid alive instead of wasting your shot on saving a bastard. If you’d shot the buckethead, they would have found you and sent you to Kessel, and fuck knows what would have happened to Winta. Raised in an orphanage if she was lucky. Dead, most likely.” Cara squeezed Omera’s hand. “You’re not going to get me to be mad at you for that. No-one could be.”   
  
Omera chuckled, but the sound was broken in half. “Oh. I don’t know.”   
  
Cara reached out for the bottle and topped up Omera’s cup. “Yeah, I do.” She caught Omera’s eye. “Any parent would have done it.”

Omera recognised the echo, as Cara knew she would, and smiled weakly. “Do you think so?”

“I think Mando’s done a lot worse to keep that foundling safe, and neither of us would blame him for it.” Cara clinked her cup against Omera’s. “ _ K’oyacyi _ .” 

“ _ K’oyacyi _ ,” Omera echoed, and leaned her head back against the wall.

  
There was a short silence.

“Kind of surprised you didn’t tell him all this,” Cara observed.

“I didn’t know him,” Omera replied.

“But you liked him.”   
  
“I like you better,” Omera said, and her eyes locked with Cara’s and went wide. She looked almost scared - but this time not scared of Cara; scared of what she’d just admitted.

There was a stunned, breathless pause, in which anything might have happened. Thunder rolled in the sky, and it broke, and both of them looked away.

“I - thought he might stay,” Omera said, too quickly. “I thought it would be good for him. For the child. For all of us, really. You were always clear - you didn’t want to be here. You wanted to move on. Until you didn’t. Well, you haven’t yet.”   
  
“Yeah, well, for reasons we’ve already been into, I’m looking for the quiet life,” Cara said. Her eyes were fixed on Omera’s face, but she’d started to breathe again. “What about what would have been good for you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Omera said, with the smooth charm that she used to use on Mando.

“Tell you a secret, Omera,” Cara said, and - when Omera looked baffled - leaned forward just enough to say directly into her ear: “Yeah, you do.”

Omera’s head turned slightly to the side, her cheek millimetres from Cara’s, her mouth a second’s thought away, her eyes guarded, half-lidded. Cara had never noticed exactly how long those eyelashes were. “Maybe,” she allowed. “But what’s good for the village, what’s good for my family, is good for me.”

Cara sat back far enough to look her in the eye. “When was the last time you asked for anything for yourself?” 

“Don’t you remember that I asked you to stay?” 

Cara’s breath caught in her chest again. It was getting to be some kind of a fucking habit.

“ _ Haili cetare _ ,” Omera said, and clicked her cup against Cara’s. “Drink up. That glass won’t finish itself.”


	6. Chapter 6

Cara woke with a hangover, but she woke mid-morning. She’d slept the night through, which meant that Winta and Omera had too. Winta was brighter and more cheerful than she had been for a while - nervous around Cara, but Cara ruffled her hair and wished her a good morning as if the previous night hadn’t happened and some of that reflexive anxiety seemed to drop away - and ran out onto the veranda to look out for the other kids, things to do or to play with. The whole world looked clean, she announced, which Cara realised when she opened the shutters meant that although the ground was sodden, the air was fresh and the sky had cleared to blue for almost the first time since Cara had shown up.

Cara looked at Omera to see if Omera was relieved by Winta’s higher spirits, and discovered that she was definitely not the only one who was hungover. Omera, if anything, looked slightly worse than she did.

“If you want my advice, you’ll empty that bottle out,” Cara said, by way of greeting. Omera grimaced and laid a bottle of pills down on the kitchen table, then knocked two back with water and closed her eyes for a second.

“I keep thinking it might come in useful for something,” she replied. “Lighting fires. Taking the varnish off wood. Raising the dead.” She shuddered. “Help yourself. And I’m putting the kettle on.” 

“What the hell is it?”   
  


“I’m not aware that it has a name. It came from the still in the engine room.”    
  


Cara took a couple of painkillers. “Fuck, we’re too old for that.”   
  


“Oh, tell me about it. Winta! Do you want breakfast?”

Winta came hopping and skipping back indoors in that weird, deliberate little-kid way that had its own logic to it, and stopped on one foot with the other one hanging in midair, a cloud passing over her expression. “Is everything all right now?” she said, warily. 

Cara’s heart twinged. What had Omera said? _ Things happened - I hope she doesn’t remember them. _ She would have been pretty confident a toddler wouldn’t remember things like a riot - she had to have been at least one, probably a bit older, because the late and unlamented Yoser had for some godsforsaken reason survived raising a hand to his wife - but obviously there had been some upheaval in the aftermath of that that had left a mark. Maybe Omera had let some of her anxieties slip. Hell, she must have done, to keep a nine-year-old so quiet about her mother tongue the Mandalorian hadn’t had any idea what language his child’s playmate spoke. Cara was confident that it would have come up if Winta was speaking Mando’a to the baby.

“Everything’s fine,” Omera said firmly. “Cara knows how to keep secrets.”

Winta gave Cara a cautious look, and Cara raised her hands. “I already promised you, Win.”

Winta thawed slightly, and went over to her mother to express her opinions about breakfast. Cara took the boiling kettle off the hob. 

And then she smelled smoke, and dropped it. 

Winta shrieked, and Omera whirled; hot water splashed up the leg of Cara’s trousers, but she didn’t notice, too busy storming outside to find the source of the smoke, whatever it was. She couldn’t see it, but she could smell it on the breeze, and it was somewhere in the village.

Omera caught up with her. 

“Something’s on fire,” Cara said, trying to keep her voice level and calm. It had gone tight and edgy, and she felt tight and edgy, eyes flickering around the houses, looking for that telltale pale curl or dark billow, listening for screams. “Can you work out where it’s coming from?”

“I can find out.” Omera laid a hand on Cara’s arm. “Cara, go back indoors. You’ve scalded your leg. Did you know?” 

Cara was dimly aware of a sharp aching pain in one leg; she dismissed it. “You’ll get hurt. You -”   
  
“I won’t get hurt. Ten to one, it’s a smokehouse and they’re setting up to smoke teckfish.” Omera stared directly into Cara’s eyes. “Cara, look around you. This place is soaking. It won’t catch. Even if something’s on fire, it won’t catch. We’ll put it out.” She pressed gently on Cara’s arm. “Go back inside. Let me deal with it.”   
  


Cara hesitated.    


  
“Do you trust me to deal with it?”

There was only one possible answer to that. Cara nodded jerkily, and headed back to the house, the back of her neck burning. Winta was waiting in the doorway, all the worry come back into her face, and Cara hated herself for a second, for fucking losing it at the worst possible moment, just because she smelled smoke when she wasn’t expecting to.

Why couldn’t it have been loud noises, or something else logical? Instead she lost her fucking mind whenever someone used a fucking barbecue. 

She managed a pale smile for Winta. Her leg was stinging now, and she knew Omera was right; she’d scalded it.

“Seems like we’re all having a shit twenty-four hours,” she said to Winta. “Don’t tell your mother I said shit in front of you.” 

Winta huffed, and - to Cara’s astonishment - flung her arms around Cara’s waist. She put her arms around the kid, and cupped the back of her tiny little head. 

“Smoke freaks me out,” Cara said, trying to copy the way she’d heard Kes explain the strict  _ no sparklers _ family policy to his son. It was kind of hard to get across to a four-year-old that sparklers looked a bit like a certain form of Imperial shockstaff that both Kes and Cara had scars off, and there were aspects of that you didn’t want Poe to understand anyway. “It reminds me of very bad memories.”

“Like me and the ponds,” Winta said, extremely muffled.

  
“Way too much like you and the ponds,” Cara agreed, and wasn’t that another knife to the heart. “Come on, let’s get inside, I burned my leg with all that hot water.”

Winta let go of her for long enough to let her go inside, and then - miniature but bossy - made Cara sit down on a kitchen chair and unzip the lower portion of her zip-off trousers on that side while Winta brought her a glass of water and the medical kit. Cara drank the glass of water and took the cool wet cloth Winta carried over to press against the scald, which was already pink and sore. When it had stopped stinging like hell, at least for the moment, she smothered it in burn gel. With any luck it would go down fast enough not to need a dressing. 

“The Mando’a word for shit is  _ osik _ ,” Cara said. “In case you need it.  _ Mir’osik _ is -”   
  


“Shit for brains?” Winta guessed, leaping to a conclusion Cara hadn't realised she had the vocabulary for.

“Look at you,” Cara said, startled. “Yeah. Exactly.”

“Are you corrupting my daughter?” Omera said, from the veranda.

  
“I’m expanding her vocabulary,” Cara said, trying to pretend she hadn’t just twitched and jumped. With a breeze running through the house, she could smell smoke from every direction. “Who’s the firebug?”   


  
“Nobody’s a firebug.” Omera crossed the room to pick up the kettle and restore it to its rightful place. “It is a smokeshed, and they are planning to go after teckfish later today, and cook some over charcoal as well. They haven’t sealed their smokeshed correctly, so I gave them an earful for that, and told them to mind the direction of the wind.”   


  
“I’ll be fine.”

Winta blew a disbelieving raspberry.

  
“Hey, back me up, Win.”

“No,” Winta said. Omera snorted, and set a plate of dark bread and butter and fruit down in front of Cara. 

“I left them sealing the smokeshed,” she said. “It hadn’t occurred to them that this is a village full of wood and people might be alarmed by suddenly smelling smoke, so early in the morning, after a big lightning storm. The breeze will blow it out, so that won’t be so bad, and later - they can just mind the direction of the wind, that’s all.”

“Thanks,” Cara said.    


  
“We all have our needs,” Omera replied, which wasn’t an answer. She put a plate of breakfast down in front of Winta, and started on a third for herself. “Eat up.”

Cara picked at the fruit. It tasted clean and sweet, nothing like ration bars with ash drifting over her on the wind, coating her skin, stuck in her hair for days. "I didn't know anyone ate those monsters."

Omera hummed. "They can taste good, properly seasoned. Aliyo is a good cook, so this should be tasty." She gulped at her tea and watched Winta and Cara eat. "You can only really hunt them after the big storms, when they float to the surface looking for jetsam. Someone just decided to be unusually spontaneous this time, which is probably also why they did such a terrible job with the smokeshed." 

Cara stretched her leg out uncomfortably. The pain had died down as the smoke wafted away, and she could see the redness receding - the fabric of her trousers had taken the worst of the heat, she thought. Omera noticed, but didn't say anything.

"Do I have to do school today?" Winta asked, having inhaled her breakfast.

"Yes. You have a group project with Tamani, don't you?"

Winta screwed up her face. "Yeah…"

Cara snorted with involuntary laughter. "What's that face for, kid?"

"She always leaves me to do all the work," Winta grumbled. 

Cara laughed harder. "Sorry, kid. Some people are just like that."

Winta scowled, and Omera hid a smile.

"I know it's very frustrating," Omera told her daughter. "You just have to learn to work round it."

"Set deadlines that are before the real deadline," Cara advised. "That worked on me."

" _ You _ didn't do your homework?" Winta looked astonished, which suggested a hitherto unprecedented degree of faith in Cara. Omera rolled her eyes.

"I always thought something else was more interesting. But it didn't do me any good, Win, so copy your mom, not me."

"But Mama always says she can count on you," Winta said, causing Cara's eyes to shoot to Omera's face. Omera got up very hastily and attended to her own neglected breakfast, turning her back to Cara.

If that was a coincidence Cara would get her tattoo lasered off.

"There's - uh, there's a difference between people you can count on for different things," Cara said, clumsily.

Winta screwed up her entire face. "That makes no sense."

"Think of it like this," Cara said. "The Mandalorian. You can count on him to take care of little green, right?"

Winta had mostly stopped talking about the child, or asking if he would come back; not, Cara thought, because she'd forgotten about him, but because she'd accepted he wasn't coming back. She had figured out younger than most, much younger than some of the other village kids, that sometimes people didn't come back. Now she unscrunched her face and nodded.

"If you needed someone to help you with your homework, you wouldn't ask him, would you?"

Winta shook her head. 

"Cara's right," Omera said, returning to the table and meeting Cara's eyes across the table. "Different people have different roles in our lives. We learn to rely on them for different things." 

_ You don't rely on anyone for anything _ , Cara wanted to say, but kept the words behind her teeth and started on her bread and butter instead. Winta looked between the two of them, frowned, and opened her mouth and closed it again.

Omera raised her eyebrows at her.

"But -" Winta said, and then stopped.

Cara swallowed a mouthful of breakfast. "But what?"

"Nothing," Winta said, too quickly.

Breakfast was mostly quiet until Winta got up and went to confront her hated group project. Cara did the washing up, and Omera sat there, in companionable silence, drinking her tea.

“There’s more in the pot if you want some,” she said. “How’s your leg?” 

Cara glanced down at her calf. It was still slightly pink, but otherwise unmarked. “It’s fine.” She left the last of the plates to drip on the rack, collected another cup of that weird fragrant tea, and dropped back into her seat at the kitchen table with a sigh. “Look, I’m sorry.”   


  
“I don’t know what you think you have to apologise for.” Omera set her own cup down and met Cara’s eyes. “We all have damage.”

Cara dropped her eyes to stare aimlessly at the wood of the table instead, slouching in her seat, feeling stupid and clumsy and adolescent. For a long moment, neither of them said anything. 

“I said I’d seen AT-STs cut down entire companies,” Cara said, at last. “They used to send bucketheads with flamethrowers in after. Not because there was any tactical purpose. So that the survivors could hear the wounded scream. There was this guy called Moff Gideon - ” She stopped.

Omera’s intake of breath was soft, but audible.

“They’d fire whole forests to catch a single Partisan hiding out, if they had to. They’d talk a big game about how it was protecting the locals, technically, but that was a fucking lie. They’d let whole blocks of buildings burn if they thought there was a Pathfinder in there, they’d let prisoners of war choke on smoke, call it a tragic accident in the fucking holonews.” Cara took a gulp of tea. “They used fire like it was their best friend.”

“You don’t have to tell me these things,” Omera said. “You don’t have to prove anything to me.”   


  
“A secret for a secret, right?” Cara lifted her cup to Omera in a toast. “I don’t know a single shocktrooper, or a Pathfinder, who’ll turn up to a Reset bonfire sober. Do you know Reset?”

Omera shook her head.

“It’s something Princess Leia came up with. Senator Organa, excuse me. Collective mourning. There’s a bonfire and everyone takes some time to be sad, and then we all get fucking wasted. It wasn’t a shit idea, but - I can cope with the fire now, but back then - I used to just hang around in the back getting drunk. Forget mourning. I never wanted to share.” Cara scraped her teeth over her lower lip, hard, and didn’t meet Omera’s eyes. “I can handle it - if I’m expecting it. But if nobody warns me - I...” She swallowed convulsively.

Omera’s hands appeared in her field of vision. Cara blinked at them, and then put her cup of tea down and laid her hands in Omera’s. Omera folded her fingers around Cara’s, and Cara shut her eyes tight and breathed out hard through her mouth.

“You don’t owe me your story,” Omera said.

“I wanted to tell it,” Cara said, and bit her tongue hard.

“Thank you,” Omera said, and Cara squeezed her eyes shut tighter, thinking,  _ you’re too kind, where’s the catch? What's this going to cost me? _

_ What if there is no price?  _ _   
_

  
“Uh,” she managed. “You’re welcome.” 

“Will you be all right today? Now that you know what it is?”   
  
“Yeah,” Cara said, and when she opened her eyes Omera’s were close and steady and so warm Cara’s breath got stuck in her throat again. “Yeah. I’ll be fine.”

***

Omera watched Cara closely for the rest of the day. She wasn’t sure what, if anything, she expected; Cara played her cards closer to her chest than that open, swaggering demeanour suggested. Omera wasn’t even sure anyone else knew Cara was from Alderaan, let alone the grim details of her past work: Cara had become just another outsider living among them, part of the community, if still always a newcomer. Omera wasn’t convinced anyone would be all that interested either, except to gasp and ask the same kind of intrusive questions Omera had lived with when she showed up all those years ago, carrying a toddler and a marriage certificate, not even completely sure she was in the right village. Yoser had left at thirteen with his parents, and though he’d described the village to her in loving terms he had not been strong on geographical specifics. After the silence of the morgue and the impersonal bustle of the ships she had taken to get herself and Winta to Sorgan in one piece, the questioning had been overwhelming. She saw no reason to subject Cara to that.

Cara seemed to be managing all right; she was a little paler than usual, her smile and her eyes a little too bright and her laugh just a bit too loud, but nobody else knew her well enough to notice that. (Omera ruthlessly crushed a tiny little shiver of something that curled deep in her heart.) She'd been so insistent that she would be fine, repeating it like saying it would make it true, that Omera had been privately convinced she would not be. But this was clearly an old fear that Cara had faced repeatedly, over many years, rather than avoiding it and concealing it the way Omera had hidden her heritage. She'd be ashamed of the comparison someday when she had reason to believe that she would have survived any other way. Right now she just envied Cara her courage.

Cara had run out of the house in search of smoke so early in the morning that no-one had actually noticed, even when Omera ran after her. The rest of the village was cheerful and jolly, excited about the teckfish hunting plan, excited for the evening meal, and swapping stories about last night's storm. Omera didn't stick too close - Cara would have noticed, and it would have made it harder to act natural and keep Cara's secret - but she kept an eye out as Cara headed purposefully off to check the weapons shed hadn't lost its roof or been flooded, and stayed within relatively close range for the rest of the morning. The krill would be unfit for harvesting for the rest of the week, but there was still work to do on the krill already drying and the brewing spotchka, and Yali wanted help sorting a load of old parts she had got for a song. Few of the villagers had experience with anything beyond agricultural machinery, but Yali knew perfectly well that Omera had once been an Incom Corporation factory girl, and she’d moved around enough production lines and spent enough time auditing a technical art class she’d never been allowed to complete that she could handle parts for spacegoing craft. All of which had to have been completely decrepit to have ended up here.

Some of these were indeed old X-wing parts. Sold off from the Rebel Alliance’s older craft, Omera assumed, and passed through a variety of different hands since then. Some of them had ceased production when she signed her first work contract, fifteen years previously. It was interesting, in a throwback sort of way, and some of them could be repurposed or polished up and sold on at a small profit. Some were just junk, but junk had its own resale value.

She got absorbed in the work, and was almost surprised when Cara came over and tapped her on the shoulder, around lunchtime. She twitched, and looked up into Cara’s smiling face.

  
“Sorry,” Cara said. “Startled you?”   
  


“Just a bit.” Omera flicked her hair over her shoulder. “Did you need something?”   
  
“Bunch of people are going off to hunt teckfish now. I thought I’d join.” Cara nodded at a group standing a little distance away, talking animatedly, and Omera thought:  _ away from the smoke _ . The smokeshed had been fixed after the earful she had given Revit, and if you stayed away from it there was no real scent, but she could still tell Cara was picking it up on the air. “Winta wants to go; is she allowed?”   
  


Well, it would certainly be educational, and probably less frustrating and better for Winta’s temper than preteen wrangling over her project with Tamani. All the children agitated to join this kind of hunt, and while Omera didn’t like it herself, she would rather Winta went with someone who would keep a close eye than that she snuck off with a group of kids trying to get their own teckfish. A bunch of teenagers back from school had tried that last year, and one had been found clinging to a tree trying not to fall in while the teckfish swarmed to the sound of screaming.

“If you watch her, yes,” Omera said. “But don’t let her get anywhere near the pools or the hunters. Sometimes people do slip.”

  
  
Cara pulled a face. “Yeah, no, I’ll keep her with me the whole time.”   


  
“That’s fine. Tell her I said she can.”

“Sure. Thanks.” Cara’s hand rested lightly on Omera’s shoulder again, just for half a second, and then she walked away.

Omera turned her attention back to the motivator in her hands, which was so out of place she was beginning to suspect it belonged to one of the Headhunter series, and should be in either a scrapyard or a museum. After a few moments, she became aware that Yali was eyeballing her.

Omera looked up. Yali continued to eyeball her for several more long moments as the party of teckfish hunters moved off, and then said much too loudly: “It can’t be true that poor woman’s still sleeping on a daybed in your living room.”   
  


Omera stared at Yali for several moments before managing to say "Sorry?"

Yali raised a knowing eyebrow that would have made a statue blush. "No-one expects you to stay single forever, Omera. It's been six years."

"Seven," Omera corrected automatically. Changes in calendar occasionally threw her off, but she always knew how long it had been since the day she'd stared down at Yoser's body in a morgue and terrified herself with an overwhelming wave of relief. 

Yali pointed a hydrospanner at her. "Seven. There you are." Some of the glee at catching Omera out slipped out of her face, replaced by a kind of old grief. Omera felt all the worse, and looked down at her hands to cover it. "I miss my nephew. I'm glad you chose to settle among us with Winta. But nobody expects you to mourn without moving on."

Omera opened her mouth, closed it again, and looked up at the sky. The teckfish hunting party had fortunately left; she only prayed no-one had heard Yali. 

"Besides. Half the time that woman looks at you like you hung the moon and stars, and the other half she looks like she wants to eat you for dessert." Omera's head snapped back down so she could stare at Yali, appalled, a brick-red blush sliding up her neck. Yali cackled delightedly. "You can't pretend you don't know! Myself I thought it was the Mando you liked, but it's  _ Cara  _ you keep watching out for, and I see the way you look at her after you've made a shot none of those silly boys can manage, you  _ know  _ she's looking back -"

Omera felt like she could reasonably fry an egg on her face. “I,” she said. “It’s not…”

“It’s not like that? Are you sure?”

Omera turned her eyes back down to the motivator in her hands, and thought about Cara, softening when she braided her hair, Cara, noticing her flinch at the vows, Cara, catching her when she dropped from the roof, Cara, holding her close, Cara, pulling her into the dance by both hands, Cara -

Omera felt hot and cold all over. She swallowed. 

“There we are,” Yali said triumphantly. “The other shoe drops.”

Omera held out the motivator. “This belongs to a Z-series Headhunter,” she said, in a commendably steady voice. “It’s not cross-compatible with the gravsled and I don’t think it can be repurposed for any of your projects. I’d put it in the scrap pile, but it might be worth a bit, to the right buyer.”


	7. Chapter 7

If she and Yali had been overheard, no-one said anything about it. The hunters returned with three teckfish, fortunately already cleaned, in the middle of the afternoon; Omera made Winta a snack and listened to her talk excitably about the way the fish had thrashed, and how Stoke had almost fallen in, but Cara grabbed him first. Omera caught Cara’s eye, and Cara smiled and rolled her own eyes at Stoke’s antics. Omera, who still felt vaguely like every inch of skin was new and tender, couldn’t help but smile back.

The cooking of the fish was a slow matter. Aliyo took charge of all three carcasses the moment they arrived, and consigned one to the smokeshed and two to the grill she had set up. There was little smoke, fortunately, but still clearly enough to bother Cara. Her shoulders had loosened up when she was out in the woods with Winta, and now they were turning rigid again. Omera conscripted her to help deal with the spotchka vats, which were upwind of the smoke, and made Winta practise reading aloud. The rest of the afternoon passed quickly that way, and at least a little of the tension bled out of Cara.

Omera had never been a fan of the Empire. It had killed her father and chased her out of most of the safe places she had known in her life, and she had kept secrets at any price to save herself from it. But she thought she hated it a little more specifically for wiping the smile off Cara’s face, and wished she knew how to ease that for her. But she couldn’t fix other people’s nightmares any more than she could her own.

Miko, Tamani’s older brother, ran round to tell them when the food would be ready, and asked if they’d be coming to eat. Omera said they would, and sent Winta to run and ask Aliyo if another vat of spotchka should be opened, and waited until both children had scuttled off before turning to Cara.

“You don’t have to come,” she said. “Not if it will make you uncomfortable.”

Cara shook her head. “Thanks for thinking of me, but I’ll be fine.”

“You keep saying that,” Omera said. She lifted a hand, and laid it tentatively on Cara’s upper arm, near the vaccination scar. Cara’s eyes flashed from her fingers to her face. “You don’t have to be fine. I mean you don’t have to pretend.”

“I’m not pretending any more than you are when you act like it’s all good,” Cara replied, half-smiling at her. “I’m fine  _ enough _ . Definitely fine enough if someone’s going to feed me.” 

Omera let her hand slide and drop, and Cara caught it as it fell to her side. Omera cut off a gasp in her throat, and stood stock-still, her eyes riveted to Cara’s warm dark ones.

“Thanks for thinking of me,” Cara repeated, and Omera really had no idea what she said to that at all, but she hoped it made sense.

  
  


Dinner tasted good. At least Omera thought it tasted good. She didn’t actually think very much about what she was putting in her mouth, which had once been a defence mechanism and was now entirely attributable to the fact that she was sitting on a crowded bench with the entire long line of her thigh pressed up against Cara’s next to her, their arms brushing as one of them sat back or leaned forward, or as Omera turned to help Winta pick bones out of the fillet she’d been given. She was aware that someone had set out the solar lamps, she had definitely helped with the spotchka, she remembered talking to Winta while her daughter chattered about the teckfish hunt some more, she was reasonably sure that she had complimented Aliyo on the cooking and said she looked forward to the smoked fish. 

But every time she glanced to her right she could see Cara’s eyes glittering in the light of the solar lamps, the curl of her dark hair over her shoulder, that half-smile that so rarely left her face. Cara should always be smiling, Omera thought, and as if the thought alone had summoned her Cara turned her head and looked directly into Omera’s eyes.

  
All conscious thought immediately fled Omera’s brain.

“All good?” Cara said.

“I- Yes,” Omera said, stupidly, and then managed to string some words together. “I’m not crowding you, am I? I can move up.”   
  


Cara shook her head and bumped her shoulder companionably against Omera’s. “Nah. I’m fine.”   
  


That last word set off a few warning synapses: it was too familiar, and too casual a deflection. Omera had been emphatic about the smoke, and as a consequence the grill had been carefully dealt with, but the scent still hung ominously in the air. Omera thought of Cara that morning, face tight with old fears and hands curled half into fists, insisting every second sentence that she was fine. “You’re sure?”

Cara leaned just that few millimetres into Omera’s space, and smiled directly into her eyes, which should have been illegal. Had Omera not already been sitting down her knees would have gone weak. “I’m sure,” she said, and turned away when Jorgan called to her, some kind of question that Omera didn’t catch.

Omera ate another mouthful without tasting it, and agreed distractedly when Winta asked to be excused so that she could play: Winta hopped up and shot off into the darkness, but Omera didn’t slide sideways into the extra space that gave her. She tilted her head back to look up at the stars, and try to remember all their names, and try, also, to catch her breath. 

The stars were different to the ones she had known. She had been too young to remember Felucia, but Mimban constellations she still recalled, and the view from the numbered Corellian moon where she had lived as a teenager, and Hays Minor, and all the anonymous ships in between. None of them looked quite like the stars from Sorgan. It had been seven years and they still didn’t feel like home, but they were clearer and brighter than in so many of the other places she’d lived, and in the faint haze from the long day and the smoke and the cup of spotchka she’d already had they were very peaceful to look at.

Cara topped up Omera’s spotchka cup when someone passed her the jug, casually, as if she always thought of Omera too. Her arm brushed Omera’s - bare, in short sleeves, despite her eternal fight with the local mosquito population and the evening chill - and Omera felt it like a brand.

_ So warm _ , she thought, and wished Yali had never spoken up. How was she supposed to stop thinking about this, now that she’d let the idea out of its box? How was she supposed to pack these feelings back up, and lock them away, and let Cara be a guest, a guest held in affection, but one who would someday leave - and just a guest, after all?

_ It would have been easier if Cara left when the Mandalorian did _ , Omera thought, and her heart so instantly and completely revolted against the very idea that Omera knew she was in trouble.

She set her plate down at her feet and sipped slowly at the spotchka, focusing instead on the laughter and chatter, the high-pitched giggling of the children as they chased each other around, the sound of a happy, thriving village. It was all so different from the weeks of nervous terror that had accompanied the raids, before they’d had the option of self-defence.

So much change, Omera knew, so many improvements for the better, and those in her life not the least of them. Cara had wandered in like she planned to leave as soon as possible, and instead she’d made the place more of a home for Omera than it had ever been.

And she was still going to leave, one day. The arrest warrant or the chain code would make it so she had no choice.

Omera closed her eyes on a sudden bright sting, and then shot them open again when Cara’s hand closed softly on her own.

“I’m fine,” Omera said, and wasn’t sure Cara believed her.

  
  


Winta came back to her seat and flopped down half on top of Omera about an hour later. Either the children had run out of games Winta wanted to play, or Winta herself had run out of energy; it had been quite a long day, after an exhausting few weeks. It seemed ridiculous that only twenty-four hours ago Cara had crashed straight through the walls of secrecy Omera had put up around her mother tongue and her father’s memory. Winta had been scared of that, scared enough that Omera wouldn’t be surprised if she had slept shallowly; she’d clung to Omera, asking if it was really all right, if it was okay that Cara knew, and what would happen now. Omera had reassured her, and she felt confident in that, but she wondered now if she had done Winta a disservice, teaching her to hide half their heritage.

It was an uncomfortable thought. She put it aside and focussed on her daughter.

“Tired?” she said, stroking Winta’s hair back off her face and tucking it behind her ear.

“No,” Winta said unconvincingly.

“Mm-hm.” 

Winta wriggled and kicked and twisted herself until she was lying cramped on the bench, with her head resting on Omera’s leg; Cara looked round, attention attracted by the scuffle, and grinned down at Winta.

“Super convincing,” she said, and reached over to ruffle Winta’s hair. 

“I’m awake,” Winta said defensively.

“Yeah, kid, sure.” Cara caught Omera’s eye and shook her head, grinning. Omera smiled helplessly.

“I can stay awake,” Winta said, into the fabric of Omera’s dress.

“I’m sure you can,” Omera said, having learned not to argue with a child somewhere around Winta’s first full sentences, and returned to her conversation with Tamani and Miko’s father about the deficiencies of the homeschooling programme. Fifteen minutes later Winta had gone limp and quiet, and her breathing had evened out into a slow, sleeping rhythm.

“ _ Wide _ awake,” Cara said more quietly, grinning again.

“She’s just very stubborn,” Omera murmured.

“I have no idea where she gets that from.” (Omera’s jaw dropped, and Cara’s grin broadened.) “Want me to help you get her home?”

“Please,” Omera said, passing over any teasing comments about her own temperament with dignity.

Cara got up from her seat, knelt down next to Winta, and scooped her up with the same effortless ease she’d used at the wedding. Winta murmured and frowned, but her only reaction was to lock one arm around Cara’s neck like a limpet, so Omera let out the breath she’d been holding. If Winta woke up in this mood, she would be cross enough to try to force herself to stay awake just to prove she could.    
  
Cara stood up, and Omera followed her back to the house, opening the front door, turning lights on, and pulling back the blankets on Winta’s bed. Cara crouched down next to it and laid the little girl down while Omera fiddled with Winta’s rather temperamental nightlight to turn it on, and turned around to find that Cara was very carefully trying to disentangle Winta’s hand from her shirt without waking her. Winta was lying in bed, but she still had her hand stuck firmly to Cara, and wasn’t letting go.

Omera tried not to laugh. She crossed the room to pull up the blankets, and stepped carefully around Cara’s legs to come round to her other side and help. Winta was frowning in her sleep, but her face softened and eased when Omera stroked her forehead and tugged gently at her hand, and eventually she let her fingers loosen and fall to the bed.

Both adults tiptoed out  _ very quietly _ .

“Do you think you’re going back to the others, or will you turn in too?” Cara asked, in a very low voice, once the bedroom door had slid mostly shut behind them.

Omera shook her head. “The way the last few days have been, I think Winta will be upset if she wakes up and can’t find an adult. I’ll stay. We did leave plates and things, but…” She shrugged. “Aliyo will take care of them.”

“Or I could just go and get them.” 

“That would be kind.”

“Let’s not go back to this,” Cara said, and Omera’s tired mind snapped to attention. “You don’t need to be surprised I want to help.”

Omera opened her mouth and then closed it again. “I,” she said, and then stopped.

“What?”

Omera sighed, and looked at the floor to collect her words, then lifted her head and pushed her hair back over her shoulder. “You won’t always be here. I shouldn’t get used to relying on you.”

“Omera.” Cara took a step forward, into Omera’s space, and Omera’s heart did some kind of complicated flip. She and Cara were the same height, but she lifted her head anyway, lifted her chin, like that would strengthen her resolve. 

“Yes?”

Cara started her own sentence, stopped, and then tried again. “I’m staying until you kick me out or someone shows up for my chain code.”

“I won’t kick you out,” Omera said, in a voice she knew to be a whisper. She’d gone strangely short of breath. “Don’t worry about that.”   
  


“Then don’t worry about me leaving,” Cara said, her eyes searching Omera’s like she was looking for something important, and thought she might have found it. She was less than a foot from Omera now, so close Omera thought she could feel that warmth again, even though she knew it was an illusion.

“Okay,” Omera breathed.

There was a still, quiet pause, and then Cara laughed, very softly.

“Shit,” she said. “All this over a bunch of plates.”   
  
Omera clapped a hand over her mouth to keep herself quiet, and leaned forward into Cara’s shoulder to stifle her laughter.

  
“I mean, I guess plates are important, but -”   
  
“Oh, shut up.” Omera pushed lightly at Cara’s shoulder. “You get the plates. I’ll put the kettle on.”

It felt like seconds that she was gone, or perhaps hours, or perhaps both. Omera could hardly tell. She felt lightheaded, and the feeling of being simultaneously hot and cold all over had returned. She shut her eyes, braced her hands behind her on the kitchen table, and took deliberate calming breaths. In for five. Hold for five. Out for five.

_ Why _ did she keep thinking about the way Cara smiled, like she had some kind of outrageous piece of mischief in mind, like something was the funniest thing in the world, like she wanted to share, just with you -

Omera seriously considered going behind the bathroom screen and sponging herself off with the coldest water possible.

She heard footsteps on the veranda and straightened up hastily, pushing her hair back off her face and turning her attention to the shutters she should have closed earlier. By the time Cara actually came inside, Omera thought - she hoped - she looked more normal.

Cara dumped the plates in the sink, and Omera heard the sound of the rainwater tap sputtering to life as she scrubbed them clean. The kettle boiled, and Omera bolted the last shutter back into place and crossed the room to fill two cups of tea. By the time it had steeped she had drawn the curtains and tidied up the remains of Winta's incomplete group project, formerly scattered all over the table, and Cara had finished with the washing up.

_ I never even had to ask _ , Omera thought. Her heart twinged. She swallowed it back, and picked up her cup of tea. Cara drained the sink and dried off her hands, arms wet halfway up to the elbows, then took her own cup and clinked it lightly against Omera's, like a toast.

Omera smiled.

Cara jerked her head in the direction of Winta's bedroom. "Still quiet?"

"Fast asleep." Omera burned her tongue on her tea. She blew across the surface of the drink, and pretended not to know Cara was watching her mouth. "Will you have trouble? Sleeping, I mean?"

Cara shrugged and looked away. "Smoke's gone. Maybe. Maybe not." She gave Omera a lopsided smile. "I never know until I try."

"I could - sit with you, for a while, if you like,” Omera offered. Her heart seemed to be jumping halfway out of her chest, like a hummingbird trapped in a cage. "If it helps not to be alone."

Cara's smile softened. "It does."

_ Stay with me _ , Omera wanted to say,  _ I'll stay with you _ . She swallowed back her words, and made her way over to the daybed. The mosquito net was still tied up above it, the blankets and cushions pulled into rough order. She sat down, back to the wall, and tucked one of the cushions behind the small of her back.

"Come and sit with me, then," she said, her mouth gone dry, and resorted to her tea to ease it. She looked up through her lashes when she realised Cara hadn't moved, and saw Cara watching her with a kind of wonder and affection that made her cheeks heat, and something darker, a kind of promise that curled deep in the pit of Omera's stomach. 

Part of Omera wished she were as drunk as she had been last night - just enough not to be self-conscious of what she was doing, not to feel exposed by the way Cara looked at her. Another part argued with that; wanted to relish and remember every second of this, wanted to lean into it, wanted everything Cara was willing to offer. Omera had not managed to reconcile these two warring thoughts by the time Cara came over, pulled off her boots (Omera watched the vulnerable nape of her neck, the line of her vertebrae moving under skin as Cara leaned forward, and clutched her hands helplessly around her cup so she wouldn't reach out and touch) and sat down next to her. Close. But not so close. Not close enough that Omera didn't want, desperately, to lean in and make it closer.

Cara sat up far enough to lean her elbows on her knees and look sideways at Omera, pushing her loose hair behind her ear to reveal that promising half-smile. Omera took her heart into her hands, and tucked a cushion between Cara's lower back and the wall and held her left arm open.

"Lean on me," she said.

Cara sat upright and leaned back to let Omera slide her arm around her shoulders, and allow Cara herself to rest a little of her weight against Omera's side, her head tilting against Omera's as her right arm slipped round Omera's waist. She was very warm and solid, and this close, Omera could feel the soft, relaxed rise and fall of her breathing.

Omera caught a gasp in the top of her throat and stuffed it back into her lungs. She hadn't bargained on being held in return; hypersensitive as she currently was, Cara's loose, casual grip on her waist felt like a brand, even through two layers of clothing.

"What do you normally do when you have trouble sleeping?" she asked, hoping her voice was level and thoughtful.

Cara paused. "I had friends who used sleeping pills," she said. "They all had a shit time getting off them. So I just lived with it and drank a lot of caf the next day. Found someone to hold onto, if I could."

"Well, you managed this time," Omera said, looking determinedly straight ahead of herself.

Cara laughed very quietly. "You offered," she reminded Omera.

"I did." Omera leaned a little into Cara, who shifted like she'd been waiting just for this, like she was always ready to make space for anything Omera asked her for. Omera was beginning to feel like she didn't need the product of the engine room still to get drunk on this. "I meant it."

"Good," Cara said, the faintest tired edge to her words. Omera moved her shoulder slightly, so that Cara could lean her head more comfortably against it, and brushed Cara’s hair off her face when it fell into her eyes. Her thumb brushed against the firebird tattoo, and Cara smiled.

“When did you get that done?” Omera asked, feeling bold.

“About nine years ago. Felt like wearing my heart on my sleeve.”

Omera had always been good at maths. It wasn’t exactly hard to count back to the destruction of Alderaan. “Didn’t it hurt?”

_ Of course it’s painful _ , she remembered her father saying. _ But that’s the point. It’s who you are. Being who you are isn’t always easy. _

Maybe it was different for Alderaanians. Probably it was. Most cultures saw tattoos as purely decorative.

Cara shrugged. “It was over fast.”

“And the other one?”

“That stung,” Cara admitted. She took a gulp of tea. “But I was drunk, I didn’t care. And all the shocktroopers had the same one. I had to work pretty hard for it. I was happy I got it.”

She still sounded proud. Omera smiled.

Cara tilted her head up, dark eyes searching for Omera’s. “You like my tattoos?”

“They suit you,” Omera said, measured and calm like she hadn’t watched Cara’s smile crinkle through that firebird several times a day for the last few weeks, like she hadn’t snatched glimpses of smooth muscle shifting under tattooed skin without even meaning to look.

There was a short pause.

“Thanks,” Cara said, sounding pleased. She knocked back the rest of her tea, and put the cup down on the floor. When she settled back into Omera's arms, Omera caught her yawning.

"Close your eyes," she said, seizing the opportunity to change the subject. "Try to sleep."

Cara snorted, but she had already shut her eyes and rested her head on Omera's shoulder. "Just don't hold it against me that I fell asleep on you."

"I won't," Omera promised, cradling Cara's head against herself and sipping slowly at her own cooling tea. "Sshh. Stop thinking."

She waited until all her tea was gone, and Cara's breathing had evened out slow and easy, to set her cup down and make the first stealthy movements to her own bed. Her eyelids felt like lead, and she kept yawning; she was tempted to just tip them both onto the daybed and stay there, but there wasn't room for both of them, and that wasn't what she'd agreed with Cara. She eased herself slowly out from under Cara's weight, and moved one of the cushions so it rested under her head when Omera lowered it. She lifted Cara's feet onto the daybed - tucked at an awkward angle, but she could straighten out as she liked in her sleep - and reached up to untie the mosquito net until it came tumbling down, shielding them from the world in a silvery white curtain. She looked down at Cara, and realised only then how much she had relaxed, compared to earlier, how much softer and easier her face was now. She knelt down to pick up the cups, and stopped, caught by something about Cara; the faint curve to her lips, the way her lashes rested on her cheek, the definite line of her jaw, the way her dark hair curled around her face, or some combination of all of them. Something warm welled up in Omera’s heart, and she reached forward and pushed a loose lock of hair very lightly off Cara's face, fingers brushing that little Alliance firebird high on her left cheekbone once more. Cara smiled in her sleep.

On impulse, Omera leaned forward and let her lips brush across the tattoo. She regretted it at once; Cara's eyelids flickered, and she murmured a sound that might have been Omera's name.

Omera panicked.

"Sshh," Omera said quickly, as low and soothing as she could manage with her heart thundering in her ears, and got to her feet as fast as possible while Cara relaxed again. She left the cups on the table and hurried back to her bed before Cara could rouse herself and ask what she'd done, chased all the way into sleep by guilt.


	8. Chapter 8

Omera slept poorly, and woke the next morning feeling strangely haunted, with the kind of headache that came from shallow, unsatisfactory sleep building around her temples. She dragged herself out of bed late, and forced herself to keep up a front of normality that just about passed muster with Winta but made Cara look at her keenly and frown. She wasn't sorry to occupy herself with setting Winta up with a maths lesson, or to escape to check on the krill ponds when Caben came round to ask her to help monitor them.

It was important, she told herself, they needed to know when the ponds would be usable again so they could get the harvest back on track, but she knew if she was honest with herself that she was running away. From the prickle of Cara's stare on the back of her neck, and the thoughtful weight of her gaze when Omera made the mistake of glancing back, she knew Cara knew it too.

Omera threw herself into the morning. She didn't know what she was trying to escape: the possibility that Cara remembered last night's kiss, or the possibility that she didn't. She just knew the situation was untenable, the pressure unbearable, and the only thing she had ever learned to do when pushed to her limit was to run. 

She couldn't even figure out why she was so upset, but it had her off-centre all morning, jittery enough that Caben commented and she had to say she'd slept badly the previous night and let him draw his own incorrect conclusions. She didn't like lying to him like this - she had hoped the days of half-lies were over once she'd fully settled into the village and their usual round of visitors had accustomed themselves to the existence of Yoser's widow and young child - and she liked it still less when he assumed Winta's nightmares were to blame and suggested medication. She squashed that idea, conclusively enough that he stopped talking entirely for ten minutes, but the guilt still burned through her.

Omera breathed in, breathed out, and ran through every mantra she could think of in the privacy of her own head, but found that none of them could quite settle the strange fluttering round her heart or the tight lump at the top of her throat. It twisted whenever she thought of Cara leaving in disgust because she didn't share Omera's stupid, ungovernable feelings, and the fluttering increased almost to dizziness whenever Omera thought of the idea that she might stay.

And maybe -

Omera cut that thought off dead. She was too used to losing what she wanted.

The sheer fact that someone had to cook lunch drove her back to the house. Cara had spent the morning giving remedial lessons in not shooting your own foot off to some of the people she hadn't originally trusted with blaster rifles; Omera hoped she'd be busy enough with that that she might not bother to return, or that someone else would offer her lunch, as they sometimes did. But Cara came back for lunch, the way she normally did, and Omera found herself stumbling around her, stupid and clumsy and finding it hard to meet her eye. Omera thought she'd covered it at first, acting cheerful enough to make her stumbles nothing more than silly clumsiness, but it quickly became obvious that both Cara and Winta had noticed. Winta at least was starting to react nervously. Cara was… a closed book, all of a sudden.

Cara took charge of the washing up before Omera could take it over to keep her fidgeting hands busy, and Winta fixed Omera with worried eyes. Omera smiled at her with as much reassurance as she could manage, and readily agreed when Winta asked her to come and look at the little vegetable garden the kids were supposed to be cultivating as part of their lessons. The place had been kicked apart by the raiders on their penultimate visit, a display of petty malice that had touched off an unfamiliar flint of rage in Omera's heart, but was now recovering. Things grew quickly on Sorgan, if you could handle the woods.

As excuses went for getting Omera alone, Omera had encountered less transparent. She wasn't surprised when Winta turned to her with wide eyes and a stubbornly still lower lip and asked if she and Cara were fighting, but it still hit like a punch to the gut. She hoped Winta had no memory at all of the strained relationship between her parents, but sometimes she thought that some part of her daughter recalled the tension, the anger and fear.

"No," she said, sinking to her knees in the dirt and pulling Winta into her arms. "No, we just -" she swallowed, and admitted it to herself. "We need to talk. Grownups do sometimes. It doesn't mean we're angry with each other. I promise, it's all right."

Winta locked her arms tightly around Omera's neck and rested her pointy chin on Omera's shoulder. Omera winced, but didn't say anything.

"Is she going to go away?" Winta said eventually, sounding muffled and much younger than her true age. "Don't want her to go away."

Omera squeezed her eyes tight shut and bit her tongue on  _ I don't want that either _ . She took a deep breath and said: "I don't think so. She will have to leave one day, because - bad men are looking for her, like they came looking for little green, do you remember? And she's going to have to deal with that, one day. But she told me just yesterday -" fuck, only  _ yesterday _ \- "she wants to stay. As long as she can."

"I want her to stay  _ always _ ," Winta mumbled. "I like her."

Omera swallowed past that knot in her throat. "Me too," she whispered, when she could find words. "Me too."

  
  


She took Winta back to the house once they’d inspected the vegetable garden and decided that nothing was about to die yet. Omera had grown up a farm girl on Mimban, before the Empire came, and the growing conditions on Sorgan were nothing like those she had known, but at least she could tell if the plants were dying or not. They were not. Which meant that Winta needed to get over her avoidance of the group project with Tamani, due at the end of the week, and Omera needed to get over her avoidance of Cara and a confrontation which was technically due never but practically needed to be addressed since they lived in the same house, and both of them needed to go home and get on with it. Winta dragged her feet and complained, but she took her work and went begrudgingly over to Tamani’s house, and left Cara and Omera staring at each other in a living room that was suddenly far too small.

“Look,” Cara said, at the same time as Omera blurted out “I’m sorry.”

There was a stunned pause. “What?” Cara said.

“No - I talked over you, you first.”

Cara gave her a puzzled look. “I just wanted to ask what’s wrong.”   
  
“I -” Omera clenched her hands into fists in her skirts, looked away at the wall, at the floor, at anything, squeezed her hands until the bones creaked and the skin stretched. She licked her lips and said haltingly: “I - kissed you on the cheek, last night, when you were falling asleep. I’m sorry, I don’t know what got into me, I should have asked.”

Unbelievably, Cara laughed, and Omera felt shame creeping hot up her chest, flushing her cheeks and neck. “Is that all? I thought I dreamed that.”

Omera swallowed. She tried to meet Cara’s eyes, and looked away again. There was too much warmth, too much - something, something that made her feel overwhelmed and lit her up at the same time. She kept feeling like if she managed to meet and hold Cara’s gaze she’d go up in flames. 

“I just thought I was dreaming of you again,” Cara said, more softly, and Omera’s head jerked up so hard the muscles in her neck burned. She put a hand up to them absently and stared at Cara, who was smiling so warmly Omera took an involuntary step towards her.

“Again?” Omera repeated, dumbly.

Cara nodded.

_ Half the time that woman looks at you like you hung the moon and stars, and the other half she looks like she wants to eat you for dessert. _ The shameful flush in her cheeks receded, chiefly out of shock, and Omera found herself taking in outsized breaths, her chest rising and falling like it was suddenly hard to breathe.

“So - it’s not - just me? I thought - it was just me?”

“Omera,” Cara said, low and amused. “Come on. You know it’s not just you.”

Omera closed her eyes, and felt rather than heard Cara take two steps towards her, so that the table was no longer between them. 

“Kiss me as often as you like,” Cara offered, still sounding hugely entertained, and Omera was suddenly, sharply tempted to take her up on it, just to stop her talking in that outrageously smug voice. “But I’m not making a move until you tell me that’s what you want.”

All the air had gone out of Omera’s lungs. “Oh, for fuck’s  _ sake _ ,” she said, in an unsteady, whispery voice that whistled out of her throat powered by pure indignation. She summoned up what courage she could find and took the last two steps towards Cara in a rush, turning her face blindly into Cara’s, one of her hands curling into the loose side of Cara’s hair. It was more of a collision than a kiss, and it felt like something had torn loose from bonds that had gone almost unnoticed for years; Omera would have sobbed if she hadn’t been far too busy to do so. Cara brought her hands up and slid them into Omera’s hair, tilting her head just slightly to ease the kiss, and a tiny desperate noise escaped Omera. She got her hands onto Cara’s waist and pushed her backwards, remembering with a rush of heat how Cara had moved so easily for her when she was braiding Cara’s hair, following her with every step until Cara hit the table and sat back on it, pulling Omera with her until Omera had to press her hands on the table not to lose her balance and fall on top of Cara.

It was at this point that Omera realised the front door was still open and she had promised Yali another afternoon’s help with the scrap. And if Omera didn’t show up, Yali would absolutely come to get her. She broke away with a gasp, and found she wasn’t too animated by the fear of Yali catching her making out with Cara to enjoy the dazed look in Cara’s eyes and the way her hand reached automatically out for Omera’s hip to draw her back in.

“Yali is going to be here in five minutes,” Omera said. “Less.”

Some of the haze filtered out of Cara’s eyes, to be replaced with chagrin. “Aw, shit, and I said I’d help Revit move that busted generator.”

“Oh.” 

They stared at each other. Then Omera stepped back into Cara’s orbit, tentatively, and tucked a loose, choppy strand of hair off Cara’s face. “We live in the same house,” she said. “It’s not like you aren’t going to see me again in a few hours.”

Cara’s mouth curved into a smile, and Omera brushed her thumb across Cara’s lower lip. There was a mark there that suggested she'd got carried away and bitten Cara's lip at some point, but obviously Cara didn’t mind.

“Rain check?” Cara said.

Omera nodded, and Cara pulled her in with one hand on her hip and kissed her so softly Omera almost melted into her touch right there and then.

  
“See you later,” Cara murmured into the millimetres between them.   
  


“Mm,” Omera answered, feeling very loosely attached to reality, and stepped back to let her move.

Cara sauntered out of the house like she had everything she wanted in life. Omera stared after her for several moments, and then went to splash her face with the coldest water she could get.


	9. Chapter 9

The afternoon went on forever. Or at least, Cara had the strong impression that it did. Focussed on moving the generator out of its housing - cracked and damaged by the recent storm, with resulting water damage - and getting it to Yali’s workroom, she had no need to actually  _ use  _ her brain, which meant that it circled enjoyably around the image of Omera’s brown eyes turned golden and furious with suppressed passion, and the sensation of her hair sliding through Cara’s fingers, her lips on Cara’s. 

Sure, she had had the dreams that she teased Omera about. The reality was a lot better. And she’d be interested to see how Omera reacted when she got her alone again. More than interested - there had been a strange wildness to her reaction, like she wasn’t used to ever getting what she wanted, like love and sex had been off her personal inventory since the day her useless husband had raised a hand to her. That sort of blew Cara’s mind. The guy had been dead for most of a decade. Yeah, Omera lived in the middle of nowhere, but it wasn’t as if people never passed through, or as if there weren’t single men and women in the village, and she was stunningly beautiful: she must have had options. Cara had seen the way some of the wedding guests from Danae’s hometown looked at Omera. She'd been tempted to knock a few more of them into the krill ponds for it, by way of an accident, until word clearly spread that the widow had a permanent houseguest and they collectively dealt with their fucking attitude. Omera didn’t need a washed-up dropper with a live arrest warrant to keep her warm unless she wanted one.

Maybe it was trust that was the missing element: she knew them, but she trusted Cara. Now there was a thought that made Cara giddy. 

The casing broken up and the generator hauled over to Yali’s, Cara lingered by Omera’s seat. Cross-legged on the floor with her hair up in a twisted knot at the nape of her neck, she was cleaning some bit of machinery Cara didn’t recognise or know anything about. 

Omera twisted to look up at her. “Something wrong?”

“Just curious,” Cara said, meaning _ I want to see how you react when I smile at you _ . “I didn’t know you were a mechanic.”   
  


“I’m not.” Omera laid the piece of machinery down in her lap with a quick glance at Yali, who was wearing an expression that looked like a cackle waiting to be born. “I used to work in a factory that made these kinds of parts, though, so I know what I’m looking at - and there was always farm machinery, when I was growing up.”   
  
“Thought they left that kind of factory work to droids.”

“Organics are cheaper when they don’t have options,” Omera said dryly, “and easier to replace when they break.”

“Shit, Omera.”

Omera shrugged. “Sorry to be depressing.”

“I can handle a little reality.” Cara let her fingers brush lightly over Omera’s shoulder and the exposed edge of her neck, and grinned when Omera looked back up at her and raised a mocking eyebrow. “See you later, yeah?”

“See you then.”

The group Cara had been with had already moved off to disassemble the damaged generator casing and see what could be salvaged from it. She caught up with them at a jog, but not before hearing - in the background - Yali’s exclamation of “ _ Finally _ ,” and Omera’s deep responding sigh. At least the inlaws weren’t opposed.

She spent her afternoon dragging apart the generator casing and then, when that was complete, working with Stoke to plan the long-deferred permanent store for the village's weapons and ammunition. It still wouldn't be built until the next harvest was sold, and the harvest itself had been put off by the storm, but at least this way they had a plan. Cara wasn't going to argue with a course of action that got everything locked up more securely as soon as possible, especially as some of the older kids were now bugging her to teach them how to shoot. Cara wasn't even going to consider it until they could show some commitment to actual weapons safety, and since the oldest of the little pests was twelve that would probably be a while coming.

She managed not to look out for Omera too much or too obviously, Cara thought. First of all, she was an adult. Second of all, when she went home, Omera would be there. She'd explicitly said so.

Also, it was her house in the first place.

  
  


Dinner was pretty normal. Cara was shocked to realise she had a gauge for that, that they'd fallen into a regular pattern. Somehow the idea that there was a normal she had got used to only came into focus when she faced the idea that Omera might have asked her to leave, if Cara's attraction to her hadn't been mutual, or if Omera had chosen stability over acting on it. Domesticity seemed to have snuck up on Cara, but she wasn’t as mad about it as she might have expected, not if it came with Omera’s minnow-quick flickering glances and smiles, and Winta - initially subdued, but growing more cheerful as she grew more confident that the adults in her life were no longer on the outs - nattering about anything and everything. She was a good kid.

Mando could have had this, Cara thought to herself, if he’d asked, and felt a faint sense of triumph. He never thought to ask. He never even considered staying. Cara thought staying might be the smartest thing she’d done since turning in her demob papers. 

_ Sorry, man. Tough shit. _

She hoped he and the kid were happy and safe, wherever they’d got to, and she smiled at Omera, who had admitted she liked Cara better.

After dinner, Omera hustled Winta off to bed, and Cara did the washing up. By the time Cara had finished stacking plates the door to Winta's room was firmly closed, and Omera had put the kettle on, ditched the sandals she usually wore about the house, and taken off the blue overdress she always wore, leaving herself in leggings and an old black sports top, her hair loose down her back. Cara figured it would still be rude to stare, but the odd appreciative look probably wouldn’t be objectionable. From the faint flush on those ridiculous cheekbones and the bold way Omera met her eyes, her judgement seemed fair enough. 

Cara twisted to lean against the battered old metal of the sink, and dried her hands off on the tea-towel. Omera's eyes lingered on her arms and fingers, and Cara caught her eye and let one of her eyebrows flicker up, her grin curling mischievously. Omera reacted like Cara hoped she would, smile heating, skin flushing up from the tops of her breasts to her cheekbones, and Cara reached out a hand and crooked inviting fingers, wondering if Omera would walk straight into her arms. 

The kettle whistled. Omera laughed, and stepped off to the side to fill the same two cups they'd been using for weeks.

"Sorry to disappoint," she murmured, and caught the hand that Cara had let fall and reeled her in. She was strong, Cara already knew that, though Cara could outmatch her easily; she put just enough force into it that Cara gripped back, let herself be tugged into a kiss that felt more like a prelude than the morning's confession had done.

"You've never disappointed me," Cara replied, taking advantage of their closeness and the solitude to kiss Omera's cheek, jawline, throat, that spot she'd been wanting to get her mouth on since the night they'd danced at Caben and Danae's wedding. "Surprised the shit out of me," she added, as Omera caught a snort of amusement on a gasp and cupped the base of her skull with one elegant hand. "You do  _ that _ all the time. But disappointed me? Never."

"There's still time," Omera remarked, a bit breathless but still way too level-headed for a woman with Cara's mouth on her, and dragged Cara up for another, sweeter kiss. Cara went with it willingly, and slid one of her knees between Omera's to get even closer. "I am not fucking you in the living room, Cara."

"I don't think I've ever heard you swear," Cara said, unreasonably delighted. "Gonna have to see how much of  _ that _ I can get out of you."

" _ K'uur, chakaar _ ," Omera said, pushing ineffectually at Cara's chest; Cara leaned back to give her a bit more room. "I'm just trying not to teach my nine-year-old bad habits. That seems to be your job."

Cara snorted, and watched as Omera filtered the tea leaves out of the cups and handed her one. "Sorry about that. She's a quick learner. What did you call me?"

"You didn't understand? I thought for sure you would have picked up the insults."

"I know enough to know when I need to throw a chair at whoever said it to me or whether just smashing his head into the bar will do, I don't know what they  _ mean _ ."

Omera rolled her eyes comprehensively. "I told you to hush, and then I called you - it means a lot of things in context, but in this case, I meant  _ shameless one _ ."

"Sounds good. Not that far off my name, either."

A strange expression crossed Omera's face. "There are words that are closer to that." She took Cara's free hand. "Come on. We should talk."

"Oh, sure, and other things."

Omera flicked her a look so full of speculation Cara almost suggested talking could wait - forever, maybe, or at least however long it took to exhaust all the ideas Omera was clearly having. But Omera wouldn't have brought it up if she didn't mean it, and Cara was pretty well aware that this wasn't chatting up some pretty woman in a bar and never seeing her again: the stakes were too high for Cara to risk fucking shit up.

So talking it was then.

"And other things," Omera repeated, with a sly inflection that completely derailed Cara's train of thought.

  
  


Cara had seen inside Omera's bedroom, but for obvious reasons, she'd never set foot in it. Standing inside it, it seemed plain and organised and very tidy; the fact that the bedside cabinet locked struck Cara very differently now that she knew at least a few of Omera's secrets. Omera liked things to look neat and straightforward; she'd like her life to be neat and straightforward, if she could manage it. Cara knew a shiver of doubt. If she liked tidy, Omera had picked the wrong woman to take up with.

Maybe she was fine with it, for something temporary - and they both knew this was very temporary. That thought should have been reassuring, and in part it was, but there was a curiously painful sting to it too. 

Omera slid the door shut. Cara suppressed an entirely different shiver, and turned to smile at her.

"Sit wherever you like," Omera said, smiling back.

"Loads of options," Cara retorted, and sat down on the side of the bed she guessed to be Omera's, from its proximity to the single glowing lamp and the bedside cabinet. She'd taken off boots and socks earlier, and swapped into her shorts, since her trousers had got covered in grease and muck messing with the generator; it felt strange to be sitting like this with Omera, feeling half-dressed. 

Omera sat down on the other side of the bed, cup wedged between her thighs to stop it falling. The bed wasn't enormous, but there was plenty of room for both of them; Cara thought about extending a hand, drawing her in, curling around that straight, indomitable form until Omera softened and eased.

"Pass me a hair tie," Omera asked, the request taking Cara so much by surprise that she blinked and did nothing for a second before automatically reaching across and taking one of a series of identical black hair ties from an open tin on the bedside cabinet. She handed it over, and Omera rolled it onto her wrist, leaned forward slightly to pull out the tie holding her hair halfway back and started to comb her hair through with her fingers.

"You braid it every night?" Cara asked, distracted.

"Yes. Habit." Omera glanced down at her hands like they surprised her, and then quirked a smile. "Imagine how tangled it would get if I left it loose."

Cara had definitely had long hair at some point, as a small child - most Alderaanian women and girls did. But after years of arguments her parents had given up on either managing it themselves or insisting that she manage it, and Cara had cut it to shoulder length. Even she hadn't been daring enough to cut it shorter until the destruction of Alderaan had really given her something to grieve, and somewhere in the middle of the war she'd stopped caring or thinking about it. Her mother would probably be rolling in her grave, if she'd had one. 

But yeah. Cara could still imagine that hair as lovely as Omera's took a lot of taking care of.

"Will you leave it down for now?" Cara asked.

Omera looked at her with obvious surprise - for fuck's sake, had no-one shown her the slightest bit of attraction since her husband died? What planet was everyone else living on? - and then smiled, and let the beginnings of a braid fall loose. Cara watched it slide over smooth brown shoulders, and cursed her uneven heart rate.

"I didn't know you liked my hair so much," Omera said, teasing.

"You're beautiful," Cara said, without thinking about it. The words came out more sincere than she meant, and she watched Omera's eyes dilate - whether with shock or with something else - and realised, with horror, that her own cheeks were heating.

"So are you," Omera said, soft and low and straightforward.

"Come off it," Cara said instinctively, "I've seen a fucking mirror, gorgeous, it's not my pretty  _ face _ women like -"

"I like your pretty face," Omera interrupted, with that specific tone in her voice that said she wasn't going to be moved, and then smirked. "Along with the rest of you."

"Come here and show me, then," Cara dared her. There was still a good six inches between them. It was a gap Cara itched to close.

"We need to agree, first," Omera said, not moving a muscle in Cara's direction. "What we're looking for here. You live in my house. You're currently my daughter's favourite person on the planet. This isn't somewhere we can just avoid each other if things go wrong. Either we get into this with our expectations clear, or we don't get into it at all."

Well, that had killed the mood, but Cara had to admit Omera was right. 

It was also, if you thought about it, kind of disturbing. Cara gulped at her tea, and then said carefully: "That dead husband. He burned you pretty badly, huh."

"We were very young and quite stupid," Omera said, with a smile more bitter than sweet. "It was fun at first, and when things changed, we couldn't handle it. We didn't know how to grow with it or how to part ways." She sighed and stretched her legs out, crossing them at the ankle. Cara's eyes automatically followed them. "In fairness, I don't know where I would have gone or what I would have done if we had."

"You'd have figured something out," Cara said roughly, but Omera just smiled and looked down at her toes.

"What about you?"

"Well I have sure as hell never married anyone at -" Cara cast Omera a glance.

"Seventeen," Omera supplied.

Cara nearly choked on her tea. Possibly she spat some of it out instead.  _ Very fucking elegant, Cara. Not like you're trying to impress anyone in this room or anything. _

Omera grimaced. "There were younger girls married. And my work certificate said I was nineteen. I wasn't the only girl around pretending to be older than I was."

"Right," Cara said. "Yeah. Well. I wasn't for sticking around forming long-term relationships. Except friendships, but that's different." She shrugged one shoulder. "I saw a lot of messy divorces. Especially a couple of years after Jakku, people who couldn't handle the peace, or figured out they'd changed too much after being separated - anyway, I just stuck to having fun with pretty women. Seemed like the smarter choice."

"So is that what this is? Fun?"

Cara felt like that was a trap. It would have been with a lot of the women she'd gone out with, but Omera didn't sound like she was about to get mad, and - fuck it, this was Omera.

"It's fun," she said, on a deep breath. "I want it to be. But that doesn't mean I don't care about you, I just know -" she put her cup down and leaned forward, resting her elbow on her knee, scrubbing a hand through her loose hair on the right side. "Look… some day, someone will most likely come after me. Probably soon enough. That stunt with the AT-ST made a lot of noise. Mando would have been a magnet for most of the trouble, and he's gone, and the money on me isn't really that much in the grand scheme of shit. But someone will show up, and I'll have to leave. We don't have a lot of time, and I don't know how much we do have. I'm not going to make promises I can't keep."

Omera had her head leaned back against the wall, those finely carved features gleaming in the lamp-light, her tourmaline eyes eagle-sharp but half-lidded. She could look dangerous, Cara thought, and liked it.

"I know," Omera said matter-of-factly. She sipped at her tea. "You're a realist. If you weren't, you wouldn't be in my bed."

Cara closed one eye and stared at her hard through the other. "I've also had all my shots," she said very dryly, gesturing in the general direction of the sunken blotch on her arm. The Alliance had strong feelings about STDs, which were preventably stupid. "No need to worry about any shitty surprises."

"That was going to be one of my questions," Omera said, unruffled. "I had a panel done after Yoser died. It was clear. There's been no-one since."

Confirmation of Cara's suspicions, but still, counter-intuitively, very fucking surprising. "You're serious? No-one ever even made a pass in - how many years?"

"Several years," Omera said, as smoothly and cheerfully as if she were talking to the Mandalorian, which was now a tell the size of a tauntaun to Cara.

"Hey," she said.

Omera sighed. "Seven."

Cara almost dropped her cup. "Fucking hell, Omera."

"I had offers," Omera said. "But no-one I liked or trusted as much as you." She ran her hands over her face and confessed, somewhat muffled, into her palms: "I don't think very well around you, though."

Cara grinned. "Sorry about that." She paused, and thought it through. It was a degree of effort she wouldn't have expected to put in a couple of months ago, but now it felt like second nature. "Do you need more space? Do you want me to go sleep through there?" She waved a hand vaguely at the sliding door.

Omera hesitated, and then admitted: "Maybe tonight. At least."

"Sure." Cara shrugged, and saw Omera relax very slightly. "No problem."

A thought struck her. "But you miss it, don't you? Touch, yeah, but - people you can trust. That's why you were invested in Mando sticking around. You didn't look twice at me until you figured out I was staying."

"Oh, I did." Omera bit her lip. "Carefully."

Cara grinned. She drained her cup and set it down on the bedside cabinet, and said: "It won't be forever."

"We just talked about that. I know. I'll take what I can get."

Cara's heart felt like it physically twisted when she said things like that. "You've got me."

Omera's smile softened to a sweetness that freaked Cara out as much as she couldn't look away from it.

"I miss that too," Cara admitted, after a pause. "Not - I mean. Friends. Battle buddies. Someone to watch my back." She swallowed. "I haven't seen most of the people I was close to since the arrest warrant went out." 

"Carrying a lot with us, aren't we?" Omera said ironically.

"Yeah," Cara said. "Doesn't mean we can't have fun."

"Show me," Omera said, and Cara smiled.

"Come here," she said, and - when Omera lifted herself to edge over - slipped an arm under her waist and tumbled Omera straight into her lap.

Omera squeaked, apparently out of sheer shock, grabbing at Cara's shoulders and gripping tight. Cara caught herself laughing, and settled her hands securely on Omera's hips, drawing her close. "Fun?" she said, and leaned forward to kiss Omera's lips and cheeks and even, when Omera's eyes slid closed, the fine thin skin of her eyelids. 

Omera hummed softly in answer, her hands on Cara's shoulders loosening and sliding forwards, relaxing into Cara's arms. Cara pushed Omera's loose hair back off one shoulder, tangling her fingers in it luxuriously - it was as soft as it looked - and tilted her head to kiss the pulse point under Omera's ear, soft and light until she scraped her teeth over it, a grace note that made Omera jerk and swear and clutch Cara closer.

Cara laughed into the skin of Omera's throat. "So what I'm hearing is," she said, "I should leave some marks."

"You are a word that means trouble in  _ every single _ language I know," Omera said, fervent and breathless, and Cara grinned triumph into the notch between her clavicles and left a stinging kiss on a collarbone. "Nothing I can't hide."

"Done." Cara lifted her head, and saw her smirk reflected in Omera's dazed eyes. "Shameless, trouble - I don't know. What next?"

"Don't  _ stop _ ." Omera untwined her arms from Cara's neck and slipped them under her shirt instead. "Or I'll think of some more."

Cara flipped her onto her back by way of an answer.

  
  
  


The next night Omera looked Cara dead in the eyes and tangled their fingers together and said  _ stay _ .

Cara ignored the way her heart backflipped and gave Omera her most teasing grin. "Tonight? Tomorrow night? Forever?" 

Omera rolled her eyes. "As long as you can."

Cara leaned forward to kiss her, felt Omera's grip tighten to bruising and the way she stepped into the embrace. "You have me all figured out."

"It took you this long to notice?" Omera rested her cheek against Cara's like they were dancing, and Cara untangled their fingers so she could rest her hands on Omera's waist and smooth her thumbs over the soft skin under Omera's shirt there. 

"Nah," Cara said."But still longer than it should have done."

Omera turned her head and slanted her mouth across Cara's like they had bought instead of borrowed time. "Come to bed," she said, and Cara went.


	10. Chapter 10

The next morning Omera tied the mosquito netting above the daybed up onto the rafter, to keep it out the way. Winta was still eating breakfast; her eyes followed the netting, and Cara mentally braced herself for a conversation she hadn’t planned and had no idea what to do with.    
  


Winta swallowed. “Won’t Cara need that?” she said.

“She’s sharing with me,” Omera said, more calmly than Cara would have been able to manage. “So we don’t need this one right now.”

“Oh,” Winta said, and reapplied herself to her breakfast. After a pause, she volunteered: “Stoke asked me if you shared.”   
  
“I hope you told him it wasn’t any of his business.” Omera sounded unamused.

Cara chuckled, and said: “If you didn’t, Win, I’ll take care of it for you.”    
  
Winta grinned mischievously. “I asked him why he asked me.”

Cara snorted caf. Winta asked a lot of questions, which she thought was normal for a kid her age, but which she also thought Omera had deliberately encouraged. It might be bad for her secret-keeping, but it was great for the focus on education Cara had already figured out was linked to Omera’s own curtailed schooling and childhood. It was also  _ great  _ for annoying adults. Winta was perfectly capable of sitting there and saying “but  _ why _ ” until your brain fell into a sarlacc pit.

“And he said?” she prompted.

“He made a noise like a broken hydropump,” Winta said, with obvious glee. 

“Well, if he asks you again,” Omera said, “tell him to ask me or Cara.”

“So what are you going to tell him?” Winta demanded, clearly feeling thwarted.

“Nothing,” Cara said, grinning at Omera. “He’s way too scared of your mom to ask.”

After that Winta finished her breakfast, put her plate in the sink, and then - with a wary glance at Cara that Cara pretended not to see - scuttled over to Omera and yanked anxiously on her sleeve. Omera sat down on the daybed and listened while Winta whispered, and then shook her head and said at a normal volume: “Of course you can still come and find me if you have bad dreams. Just knock, please, _ ad’ika _ .” Omera kissed Winta’s temple, and Winta looked back at Cara, who had to figure out something to say quickly. She prayed it would be the right thing.

“I get bad dreams too,” she said, awkwardly. “You have to deal with them however works. Nobody’s coming between you and your mom, Win.”

Omera’s smile, and Winta’s serious little nod, encouraged her to hope she got it right. 

  
  


It startled Cara, if she thought about it, exactly how little would have changed in the village’s eyes. Few people came into Omera’s house: if they needed her for something, and they quite often did, they would come to the open front door, and discuss whatever it was on the veranda. The details of Cara’s sleeping arrangements weren’t necessarily widely known, though the observant would pick up on the fact that the only person who ever slept on the daybed any more was Winta if she’d had an uneven night, because the mosquito net no longer hung down in a great bulky cloud from the ceiling. Cara’s possessions were few, and she tended to be wearing most of them at any given time; a rucksack tucked into a corner of Omera’s bedroom hadn’t been noticeable when it sat next to the daybed and wouldn’t be noticeable now. Apart from that, Cara ate, slept, and spent most of her time in the exact same places and with the exact same people she had done before. 

It should have felt claustrophobic. It was certainly a hell of a surprise, and when Cara thought of it she made an impromptu wide-ranging patrol - still no sign of any more raiders: Cara was pretty confident now that they had fucked off to some other part of Sorgan, in accordance with the advice Cara had originally given the villagers - and walked until her brain settled back into place.

It wasn’t bad, she thought, the idea of being part of this place. It was more that she was surprised she could be a part of this place. More like it had happened without her noticing, and she wasn’t totally sure what to do with it.

_ There are worse things, _ she heard Kes Dameron saying, in the back of her mind. The last time she’d visited Yavin IV both she and Kes had known very well she’d need to get out of New Republic space soon, and Kes had definitely told Shara. They’d sat out under that weird bluish tree thing Skywalker had given Shara, which definitely should not have been as tall as it was, and Cara had said she was looking forward to seeing a bit more of the galaxy, said she wasn’t made for settling down.

Pathfinders and shocktroopers were different - Pathfinders needed a certain subtlety, an ability to blend in, that Cara had never had and wasn’t looking to acquire - but they worked together, a fair bit. Cara had worked with Kes a lot. She’d teased him when he met Shara, and held Poe when he was a tiny baby, and got both Kes and Shara very drunk the night after they handed in their demob papers, and had her life saved more times than she’d ever felt like counting, and when he said something, she took him seriously.

_ There are worse things _ , Kes had repeated, and in Cara’s memory she tipped her head back and poured half a bottle of beer down her throat. (In the here and now, Cara trimmed back a bramble that was definitely not supposed to grow over this path, and chucked the off-cuts into the bushes.)

_ Than what? _ Cara had said.

_ Settling down. _ Shara and Kes had left Poe with Shara’s dad for the night, and Shara was doing something wild in the kitchen that involved a lot of unsafe running around with knives and ill-advised usage of the gas flare on the stove but would taste great when she was done. From out here they could see her, black curls tied up strictly, resorting to a sports bra and an apron because it was too hot to cook in a shirt, wrapped up in the act of creation and also the kind of cookery that meant Kes had more than one army surplus fire blanket in his house. Kes’s eyes lingered on Shara, and his face went soft.

_ Not all of us go as soft as you do, Dameron. _

_ One day someone’s going to make you eat your words, Dune. _

Cara remembered laughing and finishing her beer, instinctively, immediately dismissive.  _ You always say that, _ she’d said.

It was different, of course, Cara thought, turning to take the route back to the village. She wasn’t staying forever. She and Omera weren’t getting married. This wasn’t permanent, even if some of the villagers might think it was - Cara hadn’t told anyone else about the chain code, let alone the arrest warrant. 

But it sure as hell wasn’t the worst thing in the galaxy to head home and know where home was right now, and who would be there, and that she would be welcome. Maybe that was what Kes had meant. In which case, next time she saw him, she’d eat her words.

She came back in time for dinner - how did she even get to the point where she knew when dinner was supposed to be? - and Omera sent her straight back out to get Winta, who was weeding very seriously in the kids’ vegetable garden. Cara had originally thought it was slightly crap, but then Aliyo had told her that the garden had been torn to shreds by the raiders, which explained both why the kids were having so much trouble with it and why Winta specifically was being so stubborn about it. Sufficiently stubborn that she actually refused to leave.

“Your mom’s going to kill us both for being late,” Cara predicted, but sat down to help her. Cara was not good at weeding, had never had the slightest interest in plants - but Winta seemed to appreciate that she tried. 

“She won’t be mad,” Winta said. “She likes you.”   
  
Cara had guessed that much, but it still hit different when Winta said it. She swallowed round the strange lump that had showed up at the top of her throat, and stopped weeding. “Yeah?”   
  
“She smiles at you a lot.”   
  
Cara nodded, and wondered what the hell Winta was going to say next. 

The answer was nothing, until Winta declared herself satisfied with the raised vegetable bed they’d been working on and graciously accepted Cara’s suggestion that they go back to the house, where Omera was no doubt getting pretty annoyed about dinner by now. Cara dusted off her hands and got to her feet, and walked back with Winta to the house.

“Are you gonna stay?” Winta said, deadly serious, and Cara thought  _ shit _ . She’d never been stupid enough to make promises to a kid - no kid had ever had a reason to ask her for a promise, not since she’d left Alderaan for good ten years before - but she knew in general it was something you had to handle with care.

“As long as I can,” Cara said, trying to balance truth and reassurance. It was fair enough if Winta wanted to know whether she was just going to run off. 

_ Fuck _ . The kid had a stare like an armour-piercing round when she wanted to know something. Cara held her eyes.

“Okay,” Winta said, too sharp for her age, and Cara wondered how much Omera had really been able to protect her from; they’d been here since Winta was two, but it seemed like Winta had picked up a lot that you might have hoped a child of that age would neither understand nor remember. “I believe you.”

Omera had come out onto the veranda, presumably to see what was taking so long; Winta waved at her mother, and ran off towards the house. 

Cara took a deep breath and followed her.

This can be home for a while, she thought. It was pretty much the exact same thing she’d told herself when the Mandalorian had left; she didn’t know when it had become so complicated, or so promising. Omera probably had something to do with both.

Omera took her hands when she arrived, and turned them over to see the dirt ground under Cara’s nails and into her skin. She clicked her tongue. “Winta dragged you into the weeding, didn’t she? She knows she’s not supposed to do that.”   
  
“I didn’t mind,” Cara said. 

“Never volunteer,” Omera said dryly. “I guess I don’t need to tell you to wash your hands, though.”   
  
Cara snorted. “What if I like mud with my dinner? Don’t answer that.” 

Omera rolled her eyes and let go of Cara’s hands. “You’re a lost cause.” 

“I’m your lost cause,” Cara retorted, and kissed her on the cheek on the way past.

  
  


The next day Winta had to present her completed group project and listen to all the other kids from miles around present their group projects. To say she was looking forward to it would have been grossly inaccurate. Cara thought it was fucking hilarious, but clearly, to a nine-year-old, dealing with her peers and their lackadaisical approach to a topic none of them were all that interested in could very well be  _ the worst thing in the world _ . Cara kept a lid on her laughter, and admired Omera’s straight face as Omera agreed yes, it was very boring, and yes, it was annoying when people didn’t help with work like they should, and yes, there was always the remote chance that the holonet hookup would be struck by lightning and fried and then they could have the day off.

Omera collapsed into a chair and let her head bang on the table when Winta finally left, trailing her own personal stormcloud behind her. Cara waited until the kid was out of earshot before starting to laugh, and patting Omera comfortingly on the shoulder.    
  
“I’m pretty sure I was worse,” Cara said. “I feel bad for my parents now. But I just used to skip school and get put in detention, which I never showed up for, so maybe I argued less.”   
  
Omera shuddered and sat upright, pushing her hair off her face. “If Winta skipped school I’d have to send out a search party.” 

“Well, she’s not going to skip with Miko’s dad watching them all like a hawk.” Cara cleared her throat. “Are you busy this morning?”   
  
“Nothing I can’t put off.” Omera eyed her. “Why?”   
  
“I was just wondering if you know how well you can really shoot.” Cara shrugged, trying to pretend she hadn’t spent multiple hours thinking about this since Omera had first proven that she not only knew one end of a blaster from the other but could hit whatever targets they told her to shoot at. “Someone taught you well. Everything Mando or I ever gave you to shoot at was a piece of piss. You can do better than that.”   
  
Omera gave her a long, careful look. “My father taught me,” she said. “I was Winta’s age. A little younger. And I did some target shooting before Winta was born - Yoser joined some crews where even the cook needed to carry a blaster.” 

Yoser had told her to stop shooting so people wouldn’t match up her accuracy to her face and figure out she was a clonetrooper’s daughter, Cara remembered. “You like it,” she said, shoving the thought of a dead man she’d nonetheless like to punch out of her head.

“Yes,” Omera said matter-of-factly. “It’s straightforward. It makes sense to me. But no, I haven’t competed for more than ten years, if you don’t count the practices we have here.” She shrugged. “The raiders ran straight into us. That doesn’t count either.”   
  
Moving targets in the dark, Cara thought, and the AT-ST had done its best to blind them all first, and here Omera was, saying it didn’t count. Never mind a leader. The Alliance would have made a holy terror of a sniper out of her. 

“Well,” Cara said, “I like watching you shoot. And I’d like to see what you can really do.” She tilted her head, and watched Omera’s face closely. Omera guarded her expressions, even now, but her eyes flickered in a tell Cara was picking up on with increasing ease. She grinned. “ _ You _ want to know what you can really do.”

Omera made a face at her. “Maybe I do. What are you suggesting?”   
  


“Let me set up some targets for you and spend a couple of hours trying them out,” Cara said, spreading her hands. “Easy.”

“Romantic,” Omera said, very straight-faced.

“Hey, I’m a simple woman with simple tastes, and one of them is women who can hit anything they aim at.” Cara collected the plates for the washing up.   
  


“That must have made life in the Rebellion complicated.”   
  
“Or very straightforward, depending on how you look at it.” Cara shrugged, and flashed a grin over her shoulder. Omera smiled, and shook her head.

  
  


Omera was as good as Cara thought she was, and - very obviously - much better than Omera herself had believed. She wouldn’t have been nearly as accurate without the practices the entire village had been engaged in, but now she knew her weapon and she had found her range, and she could hit targets far more ambitious than she would have set up for herself. It was fun to watch her win when the only person she had to challenge was herself, but it was even more fun to watch her increasing confidence and ease, to watch the way she stood slightly taller, the way she grinned at Cara when she made another hit, or the way she frowned and tried again when she didn’t meet her own personal standards of accuracy.

Cara’s first trainer had drilled thousands of clones off Kamino. Blitz got all the stubbornest little shits to train; he would have fucking  _ wept  _ with joy to see Omera pick up dormant skills like this and start reteaching herself how to work with them. Cara had never had anything to teach her, as a markswoman; she wasn’t sure Mando had, either, after this display.

She was glad they didn’t have an audience - at this time of day everyone else was busy. It meant she could focus on Omera, and that Omera had no-one watching her to make her feel self-conscious. 

Omera turned to Cara, glowing, and Cara wondered if Omera would mind if Cara kissed her right here, right out in the open, even if no-one was watching. 

“I forgot how much I like a challenge,” Omera said, looking and sounding carefree for once, and Cara grinned helplessly back at her. “Any other bright ideas?”

Cara didn’t have bright ideas but she did have a bucket of bruised and overripe fruit no-one had a better use for. She picked one up, hefted it in her hand, and said: “When was the last time you shot at a moving target?”

“That size? Never.” Omera’s eyes followed the fruit, and narrowed slightly.

“I wish we had a thrower droid,” Cara said, “but since we  _ don’t  _ -”   
  
Omera took the cue. Cara hurled the fruit overarm into the air, as hard as she could, and listened to Omera hiss with annoyance as she missed the first two, and then huff with satisfaction as she hit the next three. Cara varied pace and distance, and the range ended up covered in a lot of exploded fruit. Omera wasn’t as good at this as she was with standing targets, but she was still a lot better than she ought to be for a civilian who had (in theory) rarely if ever fired a blaster in anger.

Good thing it was all outdoors and biodegradable.

“I could do better at that,” Omera said, eyes half-narrowed, her focus so total it was almost like she’d forgotten Cara was there.

“Always up to help you practise,” Cara said.

Omera’s focus snapped, and her face softened a little, a smile curving round the corners of her mouth. “Thank you.” She snapped the safety catch on, swung the rifle onto her back, and stepped forward to kiss Cara. Cara slid a hand into Omera’s hair, cupping the base of her skull, and let her mouth open under Omera’s, her other hand settle on Omera’s back. Omera sighed into her touch, and settled there; Cara felt strangely warm all over.

“I ought to have realised,” Omera remarked, when they parted to breathe. “You  _ like  _ competent.”

“Nearly as much as you do,” Cara retorted, and set her teeth in Omera’s lower lip when the other woman leaned back in.

“I like that, too,” Omera said, when Cara let her go, and they both laughed.


	11. Chapter 11

They stayed quiet until they were back in the makeshift armoury, locking the blaster rifles away. Omera had gone strangely contemplative and a little distant, but she was walking so close to Cara their shoulders occasionally knocked together, so Cara just left her to think out whatever it was that was on her mind and focussed on making sure the ammunition was logged and the locker secure. 

And then Omera sat down on the floor and said: “I was born on Felucia.”

Cara looked over at her. 

“I don’t remember it. We left when I was very little. That’s why I thought Winta might not remember - but people are different. She obviously remembers some things.” Omera sighed. “My father said he was wounded in one of the Felucia campaigns in the Clone Wars and his brothers thought he was dead. They left him behind by accident. My mother lived in the town that took him in. By the time the GAR came back, I’d been born, and he said there was no going back. They moved to get away from the war.”

Cara sat down on the floor with Omera and tried to figure out what to say.

“You don’t have to tell me all of this,” she said eventually, “if you don’t want to.”

Omera shook her head. She wasn’t looking at Cara. “Nobody else in the galaxy knows. I never wrote it down. There aren’t any records that tell the truth. Winta’s too young. I want someone to know.”

Cara reached forward and took her hand. “You don’t have to tell me sitting on the floor somewhere anyone might walk in, either.”

Omera squeezed her fingers and said: “True.” She got up, and pulled Cara to her feet; they walked the short distance back to the house together, still holding hands, which meant everyone would know about them for sure by dinnertime. They passed by Tamani and Miko’s house; tinnily, through the windows, they could hear someone presenting their project and doing an okay job of it, for a pre-teen with the twin disadvantages of shyness and a bad holonet connection.

Back in the house Omera put the kettle on like she was going through the motions, and Cara closed the front door. Not that she really thought anyone would be coming over, but if they got it into their heads to do so, maybe the closed door would put them off for a few more minutes.

“Where did I get to?” Omera rubbed her hands over her eyes. She seemed tired, but calm. 

“You just left Felucia.”

“Oh. Well, we settled on Mimban, in a farming community.”

Cara could do the math. Omera had been born around the end of the Clone Wars: she had been handling blasters since she was a little younger than Winta. Her father had taught her how. Mimban wasn’t an industrialised world, it had been stripped of farmland to get at the minerals beneath the soil and left like that, but Omera had worked in an Incom factory from the age of fourteen, building X-wings. The fulcrum all of this turned on would probably have been lost on most people, but Cara had served enough time with the Pathfinders that she knew General Solo had seen Imperial service on Mimban around ten years before the Battle of Yavin, before deserting to commit different crimes. If Omera was close on thirty now, then she would have been about Winta’s age when the Empire marched on Mimban. And handling a rifle, alongside her father, the soldier.

“Your dad signed up with the Mimbanese Liberation Army,” Cara said, adding two and two to get four.

Omera nodded. “My mother got him to move, though, and keep moving, for my sake. But eventually there was nowhere else to go. When the Empire took the town we were living in they came for him personally.”

Cara’s eyebrows shot up. 

“He ran out the front with a pair of blasters and my mother and I ran out the back,” Omera said, eyes on the table. “They left his body in the street. We didn’t go back for it. My mother said it wasn’t safe.”   
  
“I don’t know what they’d have done with you if they’d found you but it wouldn’t have been good,” Cara said, into the pause. 

“No,” Omera said. The kettle boiled.

“Did you actually want tea, or -”

“No,” Omera repeated, and then looked up at Cara. “Unless you -”   
  
“No, I’m good.”

Another pause, and then Omera sat up and said: “We left. I mean we left  _ everything _ . My mother told me to forget his name and keep everything about him a secret, and she - somehow, she got us off planet, and then we ended up in the Corellian system, and she found someone who forged identity papers, and made us fake work certificates.” She sighed, and rubbed her temples. “They’re easier and cheaper to fake than birth certificates and will pass for most purposes, just not public healthcare or education.”   
  


“So that’s why you left school.” Cara frowned. “Pretty sure fourteen is too young to work in most factories outside the Outer Rim. Did the forger up your age or something - No, wait, he did, didn’t he? You said everyone thought you were nineteen when you got married.”   
  
Omera nodded. “I used that fake certificate to prove my identity to marry Yoser, who had real papers, so technically, all my papers are fraudulent and I’m a citizen of nowhere.”   
  
Omera’s determination to settle down and create a safe, uneventful life somewhere she never had to deal with planetary authorities suddenly made a lot of sense, as did her strict attitude to Winta’s schoolwork. The thought of Winta reminded Cara of something, and then she realised it was the mental health programme the New Republic ran that she had brought up, and the bittersweet look on Omera's face when she said  _ I’m not a Republic citizen _ . The old Republic had bought and paid for half of her DNA and all Omera or her dad had ever got out of it was a lot of dead bodies and bad dreams.

“But honestly,” Omera said, slightly more cheerfully, “a lot of the workforce was underage. The foremen turned a blind eye.” She shrugged.

_ Great _ , Cara thought. “Was your mom still alive when you got married?”

Omera shook her head. “Production line accident. I got married a few months afterwards.” She sighed. “Actually, my mother didn’t want me to marry Yoser; if she’d lived a bit longer I don’t think I would have gone through with it. I wonder if she knew.”   
  
“Maybe. It seems like she was pretty hell-bent on keeping you safe.” Cara searched Omera’s face, wondering if she wanted comfort, and if so, in what form. She seemed strangely calm, for someone who was telling Cara most of the worst things that had ever happened to her. “Did you forget about your dad? Like she told you to?”

“No,” Omera said, completely unapologetic. She got up, and took a piece of scrap paper that Winta had been working on from the counter, and a pen. She sat back down, and sketched out a rapid outline of a man’s back, and a series of distinctive tattoos on the left shoulder: sharp lines, quick delivery, and yet so vivid Cara knew at once she’d recognise the tattoos and that characteristic tilt of the head if she ever saw them again. Which she wouldn’t, since the man who bore them had died twenty years before.

Omera signed a name next to the figure.  _ Anza _ . It was a star somewhere; there’d been a battle there, a famous one. Cara, who hadn’t paid attention in history any more than she had in any of her other classes, couldn’t remember which one - but she did know clones chose their own names for their own significance. So maybe Omera’s dad had fought there, or something.

“I didn’t know you could draw,” Cara said. 

“Another thing I learned from him,” Omera said. 

Twenty years after the fall of the old Republic, Blitz had still worn painted vambraces, and had customised all his kit until the quartermasters yelled and threatened to rip out their own head-tendrils, lekku, hair, or fur. “I always heard art was important to the clones,” Cara said.

“I always hoped if I ever met one, they’d know him by his tattoos.” Omera laid the pen down.

  
“Another reason you tried to get Mando’s helmet off.” 

“I’m not proud of that.”

Cara shrugged.

There was a long pause. 

“You knew at least a few clones in the Rebellion,” Omera said. Her mouth twitched. “The people who taught you to do more impressive things than jump off roofs.” 

Cara snorted and nodded.

“Would they have thought I was a good shot? Would I meet their standards?”

  
Cara’s heart just about broke. “He’d be proud of you, Omera.”

  
“That’s not the question I asked you.”   
  
“It’s the answer you needed.”

Omera sighed and pinched her nose. “Do you think you could - just  _ once  _ \- let me get away with my bullshit?”

Cara laughed. “No.” She got up and went round the other side of the table, and sat on its surface, finding toeholds on the edges of Omera’s chair, either side of her hips. She tilted Omera’s chin up gently, and caught and held her eyes. “You’re fucking brilliant,” she said. “And you’re enough. Okay?”

Omera’s eyes were shining too brightly, her jaw set too hard, and she returned no answer. But she did pull Cara’s head down for a kiss.

“I like to shoot,” she said, when they parted. “Next time I promise not to tell you my  _ entire  _ family history.”

“Next time maybe I’ll tell you mine,” Cara said, and thought of a town in Alderaan she never missed so much until the day she could never return.

  
  


There was no time to talk about it later. They both had shit to be getting on with, and Winta trailed back from her presentation in a state of advanced disgust and boredom and wheedled her way into helping test the ponds to see if they were ready to harvest again instead of doing any schoolwork. She favoured them with a detailed rundown of how lousy and stupid the presentations had been, and how she'd been marked down because Tamani didn't do the work she'd promised, and returned to the topic so regularly that Omera gave her a mild telling-off for dwelling on it. Which reduced her to the sulks. Because she was nine. 

_ Lo siento, mamá _ , Cara thought in the general direction of her own mother, who had died with Alderaan and who had been fond of complaining that Cara was going to turn her hair entirely white before she was sixty. Her dad had been a bit more relaxed about her total absence of ambition or interest in school. Both of them, Cara thought, had probably had a lot to put up with that she hadn't previously appreciated.

Winta unwound a bit by the time Omera hustled her off to bed, but the look Omera shot Cara when she slid Winta's bedroom door shut had Cara stifling a snort and reaching for the spotchka. She poured a couple of half-glasses and passed one to Omera. They brewed it weaker here than they did in the bar where she'd met the Mandalorian, but Cara had been pretty sure that stuff was cut with cheap shitty moonshine from out the back. It certainly tasted like it, now she knew what actual spotchka was supposed to taste like.

It wasn't a  _ lot _ better, mind you.

"Parenting not all it's cracked up to be?" she said, in a very low voice.

Omera clinked their cups together and rolled her eyes. "I love my daughter very much. The teenage years will be hell."

"Good luck with that," Cara said cheerfully. 

Omera shook her head. "Just so long as she doesn't make my mistakes." 

"She can make new and interesting mistakes of her own," Cara agreed. Omera reached out and flicked her ear with an unerring fingernail, and Cara recoiled, laughing.

Cara didn't think of the morning's conversation again until they had gone to bed, and Omera had settled sleepily against her chest, head tucked against the flat of her shoulder and ankles tangled with hers. One of Omera's hands was tracing patterns on Cara's back; Cara closed her eyes in the darkness to try to focus and catch the sense of whatever Omera was drawing, and then remembered. Her eyes shot open.

"Uh," she said involuntarily, and Omera's hand stilled.

"What?" Even her voice had gone soft and sleepy; Cara winced, knowing that tired as Omera was she would never let this go now.

"I meant to say before." (Omera went rigid.) "We talked about some pretty heavy shit earlier. Are you okay?"

Omera lifted her head, apparently forgetting their respective locations, and whacked Cara in the chin. She had a skull made of fucking  _ duracrete _ .

"Ow, fuck!" Cara rolled away and put a hand to her face.

"Sorry. Sorry, sorry." Omera stretched back onto the pillow so they were face to face and in no danger of headbutting each other, and reached out. Cara found her hand in the darkness, and wound their fingers together. "I'm fine. Thank you for asking. It's an old story, and it's scarred over. The worst has happened already. Retelling it doesn't hurt me."

Omera paused. Her eyes glinted in the darkness, and her teeth flashed as she bit her lip. "If you ever want to talk about Alderaan…"

"Eh," said Cara, who should have seen this coming, and leaned forward to kiss Omera's cheek and jaw. Omera smiled and slid a hand up to stroke the back of Cara's neck the way she particularly liked, and Cara had always been a fiend for positive reinforcement, so she slipped down in the bed to press her mouth to the dip between collarbone and shoulder muscle, the flat plane where the sternum rose below the surface, the slope of Omera's breast -

Omera lifted her hand to wind it tightly into her hair and hold her, just on the edge of pulling tight. Cara let out a small shocked groan she would deny until her dying day, heartrate spiking, and stilled at once.

"New rule," Omera said. "No distracting me from things you don't want to talk about with sex."

Cara sighed and let her head rest on the soft skin of Omera's stomach. "I don't want to bring it up. Kills the mood wherever you are." She'd had enough of talking about martyred Alderaan six months into her time with the Alliance. If she never again had to listen to people going on about the gleaming spires of Ciudad Alderá, or deal with people who wanted to know what it was like to be part of the last generation to set foot on Alderaanian soil, it would still be too soon.

"You don't have to. It was an offer, not a request." 

Cara paused for a long moment, trying to figure out what she felt. After a minute, she gave up and said "Thanks. Maybe one day."

Omera loosened her hold and ran her fingers through Cara's hair instead. Cara shivered involuntarily as Omera's nails scratched softly along her scalp.

"Can I go back to what I started?" she said.

Omera shifted under her. "Be my guest."

"And - uh."

Omera slid her hand back into Cara's hair and gripped. Heat twisted through Cara. "Is that what you're missing? I didn't know you liked it."

"Yeah, well, me neither, so I guess I'm learning a lot today." 

"I never thought you'd be too shy to ask me for what you want."

Cara bit down on her hip bone in retaliation, drawing a half-startled hiss and a half-hearted kick from the leg Omera had already draped over her back. "Thanks for the commentary."

"Any time," Omera said, and Cara could hear her smiling.


	12. Chapter 12

Cara had kind of assumed that the gardening and krill-farming work all the kids took part in stood in for the sports lessons she used to have at school, in terms of physical activity. No-one in the village seemed to be a particular sports fiend, and to the best of Cara's knowledge the only sports played even remotely locally (four hours off on a slow gravsled) involved linking yourself with some dumb bastard and either beating the shit out of them or getting the shit beaten out of you until the link expired. It was fun - Cara had played a few times, making decent money off the betting - but it wasn't exactly kid-friendly. There didn't seem to be popular equivalents of gravball or any of the team games Cara had either bulldozed or bullshitted her way through as a kid at school, depending on whether she liked them or not. In fairness, all the kids did distance learning. It would have been difficult to get any sport in.

Apparently, though, they did learn how to swim. Cara found this out because Winta asked at dinner if she wanted to join the small group going out to practise the next day.

"I, uh -" Cara's eyes shot involuntarily to Omera, and she ate a mouthful of krill noodles to avoid having to talk for a second. "I would _not_ be a good teacher."

"I would be teaching, not you," Omera said, looking amused. "The most we'd expect you to do is stop someone drowning, if absolutely necessary.”

“I don’t have a swimming costume.”

  
“Half the village doesn’t. Just wear underwear.”

Cara tried to think of an excuse, and failed. She shrugged. “Okay, sure. Thanks for asking me.”

Winta smiled.

  
  


“So,” Cara said the following morning, before Winta had woken up, “bikini or one-piece? I want to know what I’m getting myself into.”

“You’ve seen me naked,” Omera said, undoing her braid and brushing it out. “I don’t know what other surprises you think I might have for you.”

“You surprise me all the time.” Cara slid her fingers through Omera’s hair, wrapping a long sleek length of it round the width of her palm. Omera took more care over her hair than she did over anything else about her appearance, and she kept it more personal, too; in everything else, she dressed like all the other women, but none of them wore their hair long and loose the same way. Understandably, given that it was a complete pain in the ass to care for with limited amenities. Cara wouldn’t have bothered if she had a team of stylists just to look after her hair, but Omera was fastidious about it. “Gonna re-braid it?”  
  


“No. I’ll put it up in a bun.” 

Cara blinked at the audible discontent in Omera’s voice. “Uh -”  
  


“When I worked in the factory we all had to keep our hair very short, or pulled back tight in buns, with a tight cap. It hurt my head and it made a mess of my skin. Metal dust and sweat used to get trapped under the cap band, and -” Omera shook her head impatiently as she broke off. "It's not important."

Cara suddenly remembered the look on Omera’s face before the wedding, when she’d been staring at the scarf thing all the married or widowed women had been wearing as if it were a mouldy teckfish corpse rather than a headdress. She turned a lock of Omera’s hair around her thumb for a second, and then said: “Do you have pins?”  
  


“Yes. Why?” 

“It just needs to be up on top of your head, right? Because I’m not claiming to be an artist here.”

“I can manage the bun,” Omera said. “I just don’t like it.” 

  
“So I’ll braid it for you,” Cara said, and swallowed hard without meaning to. She’d never understood - had purposely forgotten about - the more complicated braids her parents had worn themselves and had tried to teach her. But working braids were pretty straightforward, and she had worn those… kind of a lot, until Alderaan had gone up in smoke and she’d cut the rest of her hair off and started picking fights with the Empire. Maybe somewhere else in the galaxy she’d have just stuck it in a ponytail.

Simple working braid or not - this was a personal thing to do for someone. Very personal.

“If you’re sure,” Omera said, obviously surprised. She had looked back over her shoulder and was staring at Cara.

“Yeah. Why not?” Cara shrugged. “C’mere.”

Omera sat back on the bed and passed her the brush and the tin she kept hairties in, which had pins in the bottom - the simple, cheap, sliding kind you could buy anywhere someone needed to put their hair up (or needed small pieces of flexible metal for other purposes). Cara laid both down, and ran her fingers through Omera’s loose hair, pushing most of it over her right shoulder, sectioning the rest.

Now how the hell did this go again?

Cara took a deep breath, shut her eyes, and started the braid at the nape of Omera’s neck. It was easier to do when you couldn’t see what you were doing, she remembered, at least to get started. Her hands knew the motions; she’d done this a hundred thousand times, half asleep, late for school or for work, whatever. It had just been a long time.

She opened her eyes somewhere around the top of Omera’s left ear, when she realised she needed to pull in more than the few strands she’d added to the braid thus far or it wouldn’t just be wonky, it wouldn’t stay. Omera was perfectly still, her hands in her lap, as Cara scooched forward and drew in section after section, braiding up to her temple then turning the braid across the top of her head, and then turning it round in a circle that wasn’t as perfect or as tightly woven as it would have been if Cara had tried to do it ten years ago - she hadn’t had any practise in a while - but still held together.

Omera’s hair was longer than Cara had ever kept hers. Cara brought the braid back to its starting point, plaited the rest, and pinned the stray few inches of braid tightly against the inner edge of the circle to keep it in line.

“There,” she said, and was surprised to find her voice had gone slightly rough. “Is that better than a bun?”

  
  
“A lot. It doesn’t pull. Will you teach me how to do that, later?” 

  
Cara nodded, then remembered Omera couldn’t see her. “Yeah. Sure.” 

  
Omera sat back a little further, so that she was almost in Cara’s lap. (The tin of hairties overturned.) She reached a hand back for Cara, and Cara took it; she leaned back towards Cara, and Cara leaned forward and wrapped an arm around her shoulders, pulling Omera back so her back was flush with Cara’s chest, so Cara could bury her face in the junction between Omera’s neck and shoulder and let out a very long breath.

“How does it look?” Omera said, after a minute.

“I have no idea, I haven’t checked,” Cara said, muffled. She sat upright, and turned Omera to face her. The look on Omera’s serious face was kind in a way Cara didn’t want to look at directly: she checked that the braid was neat and even, and nodded brusquely. “It’s good. I mean, I don’t know if you’ll like it, but it’ll stay put.”

“It doesn’t give me a headache. I’ll take it.” 

Cara nodded, and looked down at the blanket. She collected together the hairties, and dumped them in the tin. “It’s not special. It’s just… a working braid.” She shrugged again.

“Cara.”

  
  
“I’m fine. I don’t want to talk about it.” 

  
“I meant to ask if you wanted a hug.”

Cara let out a stupid little choked laugh. “Yeah. Sure, sweetheart.” She opened her arms, and Omera climbed into her lap and held her.

Several minutes lasted a century and the blink of an eye.

“Maybe we could just go back to bed for a bit,” Omera said.

Cara closed her eyes and slid her fingers down the pearls of Omera’s spine, counting them by touch. She looked strangely vulnerable, with her hair up. “What do you think the odds are the terror will sleep in today?”

  
“Slim,” Omera said. “But we could be lucky.”

  
  


The pond chosen for swimming had been very carefully marked, which made a lot of sense, since most of the others would either boil you alive or get you eaten by giant fish. It was the same chalky blue as all the others, which made Cara eye it with misgiving, but Aliyo plunged in without hesitation and wasn't eaten, so it was probably fine. Most of the five kids who were supposed to be practising their swimming followed her without hesitation; only the youngest, whose name Cara had not caught, and Winta, who had issues with still water, stayed on the bank. 

Cara pulled off her shirt, boots and trousers, separated her blaster from its cartridge and stuck the cartridge up a tree with her knives - not all of these kids were particularly sensible and she didn't want any godsforsaken accidents - before realising that Winta was sitting on the bank staring at the water with misgiving. Omera kept shooting her the occasional glance, but she was still talking to the smaller kid, who looked like they were actively scared of the water.

Cara cleared her throat. "Is it deep?"

"Really deep," Winta said. She gave Cara a startled look. "That's a lot of scars." 

"I've been a lot of places." Cara checked the location of the other kids - at the other end of the pond, listening to Aliyo explain a swimming stroke - and then, without any warning, cannonballed into the water. It was warm, almost unsettlingly so, and smelled weirdly mineral; she let the water close over her head as she sank, and then kicked back up again.

Winta glared speechlessly at her from the bank, completely soaked. The other kids were laughing, and Omera had covered her face with one hand.

"You might as well get in," Cara said blithely, shoving her hair off her face "It's nice." 

Winta mumbled something.

"What?"

Winta set her jaw hard, climbed to her feet, and took several steps back for a running jump that left her disappearing under the water for several long seconds. She grabbed Cara as she came up, face still set in a scowl.

"That was a tiny splash," Cara said. "You can definitely do better than that."

Winta mumbled, and hung on to Cara's shoulder tightly.

"Not so bad? Or do you want to get out?"

"I'm fine."

Her tone sounded startlingly like Cara's own when she insisted that nothing was wrong. Cara snorted and ruffled Winta's wet hair, covering her surprise. "Of all my bad habits, you should probably not pick up that one."

On the other side of the pond, Omera smiled. 

Winta rolled her eyes at her, and paddled off to the end of the pond with the other kids in. They were all practising what looked like back crawl now, looking pretty strong. None of them were at all likely to drown, at least. Cara glanced around for Omera and found her now sitting next to a wooden ladder that the youngest of the children was sitting on, tentatively dangling his feet in the water. As Cara watched, Omera slipped off the bank into the water and came to rest just in front of the little one, talking softly and smiling with encouragement. 

The swimming costume was a black one-piece with a sharp pink streak up one side. It was obviously pretty old, and designed for sport rather than sensuality. But it had a racer back that showed off the smooth line of Omera's spine and the lean muscle of her arms and shoulders, and Omera moved in the water with the same instinctive grace she showed on land, so Cara was very happy to admire.

She knew, too, that the high front of the costume and the pale blue water hid a number of small but revealing bruises that made Omera flush whenever she caught sight of them. They were not easily spotted - Omera healed fast: faster than Cara herself, who might have been answering questions about other things than scars had she not jumped straight into the water - but they were there. 

Cara smirked to herself, and flipped onto her back to float, and stare up at the soft grey sky framed by green tree leaves. The water was warm enough she didn't need to swim to keep up temperature, and honestly, it was relaxing. She wasn't sorry she'd come.

After a few minutes, a familiar hand pinched one of her toes. Cara rolled in the water until she was upright and raised her eyebrows at Omera and the smallest kid, so swathed in buoyancy aids he was more or less floating on top of the surface of the water.   
  


“Comfortable?” Omera said, smiling. 

“Yeah,” Cara said. “I suddenly get the point of thermal pools. How’s the lesson?”

“It’s going well. Don’t you think, Siso?” Omera smiled at the kid. “We thought we would practise floating, like you. If you don’t mind company.”  
  
“Nope,” Cara said. “Go ahead.” She floated onto her back again, and let her eyes slide shut, listening to Omera talk Siso through floating without wearing a lifejacket, a kickboard and four different armbands, and the other children happily yelping and splashing their way through their lesson. Winta seemed to be feeling better about the water, or Cara wouldn’t have been able to hear her shrieking along with the others, and Omera wouldn’t still be swimming.

"See?" Omera was saying to Siso, soft and encouraging. "See? If you let it, the water will hold you up."

Cara smiled. 

After a little while, Omera started coaching Siso through the very simplest swimming strokes, and Cara flipped onto her front and swam out of the way so the kid could kick to his heart's content. The class at the other end of the pond were still practising the stroke Aliyo had taught them, but they were only a small group, and there was enough room for Cara to cut through the water for a couple of lazy lengths. She wasn't the fastest swimmer she knew by any means, wouldn't be breaking any records, but she was still quicker and had better form than a bunch of enthusiastic kids. She outdistanced them as they yelped and splashed her, and fetched up by Aliyo, holding onto one of the rope pulls that had been set into the bank where it was too steep to climb.

"Keen swimmers, Rebels," Aliyo remarked, half an eye on her class. 

"Some of them," Cara agreed lazily, hanging off the wall. Aliyo's eyes skittered over her tattoos, vaccine scar, and a distinctive mark just to the side of an old knife scar which happened to be sensitive in a good way. Aliyo kept a straight face, which was definitely a point in her favour.

“Nicely done, getting Winta into the water.”

  
  
Cara shrugged. “I knew if she really couldn’t stand it she’d tell me so. She just needed to get over the hurdle.”   
  


“Hm.” There was a brief pause, and then Aliyo said: “We were all wondering if we’d be building you your own place.”

“Yeah?” Cara said casually, and let that go. If Aliyo wanted to fish any harder she could do it on her own time. 

The pause stretched out. Aliyo broke it by laughing. “Of course _Omera_ would pick someone who could keep her mouth shut.”

Cara grinned. “My lips are sealed.”

  
  
The kids splashed back up towards Aliyo. Cara took a deep breath and ducked under the water, closing her eyes and kicking off the bank to swim through the warm mineral water as deep as she could get, until the breath started to burn in her lungs and she spiralled to the surface.

Siso was watching her when she came up, a look of profound doubt on his little face. “Do I have to do that?” he said to Omera.

“No,” Omera said. “Cara’s showing off.”

  
But she was smiling when she said it.

  
  


Cara was spared any further difficult questions until they got back to the house, and everyone had finished washing. Cara was just drying herself off to get rid of the last of the clean water, which had inevitably turned cold because the solar panel fixed to the roof wasn’t really powerful enough to fill a hot tank for three people, when Winta piped up.

“Where did you get your scars?”

Cara refrained from knocking the bathroom screen over.

“Eat up,” Omera said. “And don’t ask personal questions.”

“It’s not a secret,” Cara yelled from behind the screen, avoiding her own eyes in the mirror as she dressed. “I got them fighting, Win.”

  
“Why were you fighting?” Winta now appeared to be talking with her mouth full.

“Because of the Empire,” Omera said. “ _Winta_.”

“But why was _Cara_ fighting the Empire?”

Cara had a lot of good reasons for fighting the Empire. Several of them had blown up in front of Princess Leia’s eyes. She stepped out from behind the screen, and smiled at Omera, who was starting to look agitated under her usual veneer of calm. “Because somebody had to, Win.”

“Like Luke Skywalker in the cartoons!”  
  


“There are cartoons of Luke Skywalker?” Cara shook her head. “That I have to see. He was just another dumb kid along with all the rest of us dumb kids, except he had a lightsaber and -” she wiggled her fingers at Winta - “ _the Force_. But he put his trousers on one leg at a time same as the rest of us.”

Winta’s mouth fell open, exposing her lunch.

“Winta,” Omera said, collapsing into a kitchen chair with exasperation. “If you’re going to ask personal questions you could at least chew and swallow.”

Winta obliged. “You _know_ Luke Skywalker?”

“No, not really.” Cara sat down at the table. “I’ve been in a couple of the same battles as him. But he was mostly in the air, and he doesn’t fly troopships, he’s an X-wing hotshot. I was on the troopships. Well, jumping off troopships.”

Winta frowned. “What’s that like?”  
  


“Bad for your knees,” Cara said, instead of any of the other possible answers. Omera had taken her braid down to wash thermal pondwater out of her hair and was brushing it out; she cast Cara a quick glance from behind the sheer ebony fall of her hair, but didn’t intervene.

“Doesn’t it hurt?”  
  


“It was worth it,” Cara said. She leaned back in her chair. “I beat Mando, the first time I met him. I thought he was trying to make trouble for me, he thought I was trying to make trouble for him, not a good combination.”

  
Winta frowned harder. “But you’re friends.”   
  


“Now we’re friends.” Cara grinned at Omera, who looked incredulous. “We fought to a stalemate and then he bought me a drink.” 

  
“He can be a very odd man,” Omera said, with understatement.

“Believe me, when I met his kid, I agreed with you.” 

“Little green isn’t odd,” Winta said. She was still frowning. “So if I worked really hard, if… someone came back, could I beat them?”

Omera did not drop her hairbrush, but it was a close thing. Cara felt how carefully level her own voice went when she replied. “You mean the raiders?”

Winta gave a tiny nod.

“When you’re bigger,” Cara said slowly, “yeah, you could.” She wondered, for the first time, exactly how much of the clonetrooper DNA passed down the generations. It was kind of hard to recognise, when she’d only known Blitz and seen a few other old troopers in passing, and all of them looked old enough to be Omera’s grandfather. But she’d seen footage of clonetroopers in their prime in action: Omera shot like one, and sometimes she moved like one, with an instinctive economy of motion that a civilian might mistake for mere grace. She built muscle more easily than most women would, too, and lean as she was there was more power in her than most would suspect - especially wrapped up in that blue overdress. Whatever that meant for Winta was a mystery, especially since Omera had been raised by her clonetrooper father for the first ten years of her life, and Winta had never had that grounding. 

Cara sighed. “If someone shows up, and you know they’re dangerous,” she told Winta, “you’ve got good instincts, so I know you know what I mean - the first thing you do is run. Fucking - get out of there.” She waved an emphatic hand. “Don’t hesitate. If you have to fight - go for the soft parts. Eyes, throat, groin. Eyes are the safest bet on most species. And again. Don’t hesitate.”

Winta’s eyes were very round. She looked at Omera.

“It’s good advice,” Omera said. “Don’t hesitate.”

She looked across the table at Cara, and Cara remembered: _I had a blaster and a clear shot at the stormtrooper who killed Yoser. An easy shot. I could have stopped him. I didn’t._

_Don’t hesitate._

Cara tipped her glass of water in Omera’s direction, in a toast.

Omera smiled faintly. Their own lunch, leftovers, was still heating up; Omera stood to take care of it, and kissed the top of her daughter’s head. “It won’t happen,” she said. “I will kill anyone who gets close enough to lay hands on you.”

Winta stared between her and Cara. “Okay,” she said, finally.  
  


“Do you think we did the right thing, telling her that?” Omera asked, later, when they’d gone to bed.

“I don’t know,” Cara said. “Guess we’ll find out if she beats up Miko for pulling her hair.”

Omera tried to smother her with a pillow.


	13. Chapter 13

The harvest really kicked off in the next few days; the whole village disappeared into it, working just about sunrise to sunset. Cara welcomed the hard work and the sense of purpose even as she cursed the ache in her muscles and the way her clothes never seemed to have time to dry all the way through. Omera lent her spares, so far as that was possible, but they just weren't built the same. 

"It's only a week," Omera said, smiling at her over another dawn wake-up call. Cara should be used to those, but she'd always liked to sleep in if she had someone to sleep in with. (The daybed hadn't been slept on for weeks.)

"Mm?" 

"The harvest. It only lasts a week."

Cara didn't open her eyes. "Five more minutes."

Omera laughed. "No."

From the sound of her voice, she was leaning over Cara; Cara made an educated guess and flung an arm around Omera’s waist, pulling her down on top of Cara. Omera laughed again, and Cara smiled into the sound.

“Five more minutes,” she repeated. “Please.”

Omera got her knees under herself, and braced them either side of Cara’s hips. Her hair was still loose; it fell across Cara’s face and shoulders as Omera leaned down and spoke directly into her ear. “Get up,  _ cyar’ika _ . Or you can stay here, by yourself, bored...”

“I feel like I could probably think of something to do.” Cara turned her head to the side, and caught Omera’s lips with her own. She tasted like toothpaste and early mornings.

“Unaccompanied?”

Cara slid one hand up Omera’s flank by way of a response. “Unless you get it into your head to join me.”   
  


“I have work to do.” Omera kissed her forehead. “Let me up, Cara. You can sleep in or not, whichever you like.”

Cara let go her grip on Omera’s waist, and Omera sat up. Cara opened her eyes. “This is a  _ great  _ way to convince me to get out of bed,” she remarked, laying her hands on Omera’s knees.

Omera’s eyebrows twitched. “Baby steps.”

Cara let her hands drop. “Fine, I’ll get up.”

“You can stay in bed if you want to,” Omera said, getting up. “You’re not  _ required  _ to take part.”

  
“So, what, I live here, I eat your food, I drink your liquor, and then I don’t help out?” Cara shook her head. “That’s not how I do things.”

“I didn’t think it was. I just think you don’t want to get out of bed.”

“I think I have a great incentive for staying in bed, and if she gets up, I might as well too.” Cara cast around for her underwear and trousers. “You said harvest lasts a week like this?”   
  


“The most intensive period is a week, yes - we have to clear out the ponds before they swarm and panic.”

“How do  _ krill  _ panic?”

Omera grimaced. “Believe me, you don’t want to see it. When there are too many in a pond they lose it, cluster, filter all the available oxygen out of the pond and drown themselves. And then they rot very quickly.”

“Fuck me, I should  _ not  _ have asked.”   


  
Omera snorted. “At the end of the week we’ll have all the ponds cleared. Then a few more days until all the krill are prepared for sale, and then we’ll take a load of them into town. Big excitement.”

There was a faint ironical undertone to her voice. Cara smiled, but didn’t comment on it. “You think you’ll go with it?”   


  
“I often do. You?”   


  
Cara hesitated, and covered it by pulling her shirt over her head. This was something she’d been thinking about extensively, though Omera would have been surprised to learn it. “I don’t think so,” she said slowly. “For one… I don’t want word to get out I’m still here, if I can avoid it. Yeah, the bounty on me isn’t huge, but there’s always someone who needs to eat. Better let them think I’ve moved on.”   
  


“Because if someone comes after you…”   


  
“I’ll have to leave.” Cara and Omera’s eyes locked, and Cara saw Omera’s jaw set. “Where there’s one, more will show up, and - yeah, I’m not letting you in for that.”   
  


“I don’t think I could cope with that,” Omera said frankly. She smoothed her skirt down the front of her thighs. “You said for one. What’s the other point?”   
  


Cara sat down on the side of the bed and started to lace up her boots. “You said the raiders wrecked your harvests. But they weren’t locals, and they didn’t have an informant in the village, or you’d have told me and Mando.”   


  
Omera’s eyebrow arched. “If there had been an informant in the village I don’t think they would have survived the first few raids.”   


  
“Lot of accidents you can have in a place like this,” Cara said ironically. “But they still knew to hit you when the krill ponds were profitable and you’d mostly emptied them. Which means  the raiders were watching you.”   


  
Omera went very still. Cara held up her hands. “Look, I’ve been all over this place, I’ve seen no signs of anything, I’m pretty sure they’re gone. And there’ll be enough people on the krill load that I’m not worried about that. There aren’t enough of the raiders left to overwhelm the caravan. But if they do show up here… they’re not going to find the place empty.”

Cara could see Omera thinking about Winta and the other children: her face had turned to stone.

  
“Then I guess I’ll be staying too,” Omera said, quiet and almost casual.

“It’ll be like a holiday,” Cara said. “No Yali cackling at you whenever you turn around. No nosy questions from Stoke.”   
  


Omera rolled her eyes. “Caf?”   
  


“Please.” Cara stood up, boots laced, knives in place. “Hey.”   
  


Omera turned back. “What?” 

Cara caught her by the waist again and pulled her in for a kiss. “Good morning.”   


  
Omera laughed.

  
  


The group taking the harvest to town went off with a great deal of fanfare and Yali in charge. There still hadn’t been any kind of election - Omera had explained how the village governance theoretically worked, but most of it had gone in one of Cara’s ears and out the other without really sticking on the way - but Yali was the oldest and the ballsiest of the unofficial leaders they had, and she drove a hard bargain. She was the obvious choice to lead the group.

Cara couldn’t help noticing that she explicitly left Omera in charge. That rankled a bit, in a strange way; Omera’s authority was so obvious to Cara, and so automatically accepted by most of the village on an ordinary day, that the reminder that the village wouldn’t consciously accept her as a leader pissed Cara off. She’d done nothing to deserve that except be born somewhere else, so far as Cara could tell, and her wry acceptance of it irritated Cara. She deserved better.

Hanging around watching the caravan of gravsleds take off, with all the chattering and fuss and technical hitches necessary to moving such a large load and so many people, Cara was conscious of a certain amount of surprise. She didn’t usually waste her time worrying about whether people had what they deserved - or at least, she hadn’t for years, not since she’d seen that the last of her living friends on Yavin IV would be fine and had walked away to face whatever non-Republic space had to offer her. And yet here she was, twice in the course of a few months, telling Mando that he deserved to settle down and make a decent life for himself and his kid, thinking that Omera deserved to live somewhere she could use her talents instead of wasting her life in a backwater that didn’t even offer her the safety she craved.

Fucking ridiculous. As if Cara had anything to say about it. 

Omera collected up the kids and hustled them back to homeschool, which had been suspended during the most intense period of the harvest, and which they were now all having some trouble getting back to. Pretty disrupted, as educations went: raiders, weddings, harvests - no wonder Omera frowned over what they were learning, and pushed Winta to stick with her books. Yet another reason that Winta was slightly separated from the other kids.

The krill ponds were now clear; they would bounce back over the course of the next few weeks, but they needed careful nursing for a few days to make sure most of the krill spawn currently floating around in tiny translucent egg form were able to hatch. Cara hadn’t fully understood Caben's explanation of How A Krill Farm Works, mostly because it had been initially delivered during the first days of her stay, when she had been totally preoccupied by the Mandalorian’s unhinged plan and completely uninterested in how the village worked, except for anything that might impede her teaching them not to stab themselves or their friends in the foot. Nor was she particularly interested in krill now. But she was capable of helping with the various straightforward but fiddly tasks required to care for the eggs, and since the village had a lot of ponds to take care of now that the absence of the raiders meant they could put resources into them, she was kept pretty thoroughly busy for a while.

Which was why she didn’t know what Winta was studying until she returned to the house, stood on one foot to remove a boot with a thoroughly knotted lace, and heard Winta say:

“I didn’t think Alderaan was a planet any more anyway.”

Cara lost her balance and grabbed at the doorjamb, which creaked. Winta’s head jerked up, and Omera - sitting across the table from Winta with a datapad and stylus - went very still.

“The planet is gone, but there are still Alderaanians,” Omera said, into the quiet, while Cara was still figuring out what words were and which ones she could use. “Like Mandalore. Mandalore is very badly damaged, and politically it’s a mess, but there are still Mandalorians. Their code and traditions live on. Not every people has a planet.”

Cara sat down on the floor and focused on her knotted lace, hiding her face. Winta had gone unnervedly quiet, and Cara felt the last thing she needed to do was freak out the kid or Omera.

“Why don’t you tell Cara what you’re working on?” Omera said.

“Uh,” Winta began. “Well. We got told to research a planet in the New Republic… all of us… and I got assigned Alderaan… even though it’s  _ not a planet _ so I don’t see why I got given it.”   


  
“It has a seat in the New Republic Senate,” Cara said. Her voice was not as scratchy as she expected it to be. “That’s probably what they’re going off.” She hauled her boots off and dropped them next to Omera’s. 

“But everyone else is doing stuff about the capital city and like the species that live there and the major rivers and spaceports and things, and I can’t do that, so I don’t know where to start.” 

Cara caught a breath that had turned into choking and swallowed it with some difficulty. Omera was watching her sideways, steady and braced, and Cara thought of the braid in Omera's hair, of showing her how it was done, all the memories that were catching up now she’d stayed still long enough.

She supposed it was only fair. Omera had shared her past. It wasn’t surprising that Cara’s own haunted her.

“You could talk about both past and present,” Omera suggested.

“That’s extra work,” Winta pointed out, accurately.

“Your project will certainly be more interesting than the others’.” 

Winta pulled a face. Cara imagined herself in the kid’s place, and got a sudden vivid flash of what her own reaction would have been: she laughed. That did startle Omera, and Winta looked at her in obvious confusion. She took a couple of rusty steps forward, and ruffled Winta’s hair.

“Hey, Win,” she said, forcing the words out. They came easier after the first few syllables. “If you need information for your project - I’m from Alderaan.”   


  
Winta’s jaw dropped.

“I’m just - I’m tired,” Cara said with difficulty, jerking her thumb at the open bedroom door. “I’ll just -”   


  
She headed for the bedroom. Behind her, she heard the faint scuffle of Winta jumping out of her chair, and the first syllable of her name cut off by Omera saying, gently but definitely: “Winta, let Cara have her space. You can apologise later.”   
  


“But,” Winta began.

“ _ Winta _ .”

“It’s okay,” Cara said, without looking around. “I’m fine.”

She slid the door closed behind her, and sat down intending to take off her socks and trousers. But the bed was soft and comfortingly familiar, and Cara felt numb and shivery, like the post-vaccine shock she’d had for twenty-four hours and shaken off along with a stiff arm. She curled into a ball on top of the comforter, and never later remembered letting her eyes fall closed. 

  
  


Cara woke up because Omera was stroking her hair, and was strongly tempted to just keep her eyes shut and let it happen. But Omera knew what it looked like as she moved from sleep to waking, and she said very softly: " _ Su cuy' _ .”

Cara rolled onto her back and found that Omera was sitting on the bed next to her, knees drawn up, one hand planted by Cara’s head, the other now resting on Cara’s chest, somewhere just over her heart. Cara herself felt thick and stupid, her entire face stiff. 

“How long have I been asleep?” she mumbled. Her face was sticky, and it ached. It was evening; the curtains had been closed, but the shutters were still open a crack, a cool breeze blowing through the room.

“About an hour. Winta’s gone to watch a holomovie with Tamani.”

“Not because -”   


  
Omera shook her head. “This was planned a while ago.”

Cara relaxed, and stretched out her legs. “Thought she hated that Tamani kid.”   
  


“They get on very well so long as they’re not doing schoolwork together.” Omera lifted her hand and brushed a lock of Cara’s hair softly off her face. 

“She okay?”   
  


“She’s upset that she upset you. She’ll be fine.” 

Cara closed her eyes, regret cutting bitterly through her. “I didn’t - look, it was an accident, and I wasn’t expecting…”   
  


Omera waited until it was clear she wouldn’t be saying more, and then said gently: “Obviously.” She paused, and said: “This isn’t something you’ve talked about before, is it? Alderaan?”   


  
Cara shook her head. “People only ever want to talk about the tragedy of it. Bunch of fucking gawpers. If I had a credit for every time someone asked me how I  _ cheated death _ , I’d have bought out my chain code and hired a shit-hot lawyer to get me off the Republic charges.” She shrugged. “I’d rather laugh than cry. So I just don’t fucking tell people. Everyone who matters knows, anyway.”

Talking felt exhausting. She leaned her head against Omera’s thigh, and Omera ran light fingers through her hair again. “I know,” Omera said. “I know.” She sighed, and leaned away. “Did you know you were crying in your sleep?”   
  


Cara jerked and tried to sit up. Omera pushed her back down with one hand. “Shit. I -”

  
“You didn’t make any noise. I realised when I opened the door and you didn’t move.” Omera set down a shallow bowl on the other side of Cara’s body, and took a cloth from it. She wrung it out, quick and businesslike. “Shut your eyes.”

“I can take care of it.”

  
“I know. Will you let me take care of you?”   
  


Cara opened her mouth and shut it again, and then closed her eyes. Omera chuckled, and passed the cloth over her eyes. If pressed, Cara would admit that it felt a lot better; the weird  sticky sensation around her eyes peeled away, and the cool water leached some of the tension out of her temples.

Omera moved the bowl off the bed - Cara heard it clink as it hit the bedside cabinet - and then settled back onto the bed with a sigh. Cara shifted to rest her head in Omera’s lap, and one of Omera’s hands came up to cradle the side of her face and smooth a thumb over one of her ears. The cartilage had been nicked with something in training, years ago, and the scar had never smoothed over. 

“I liked Alderaan,” Cara said. “I was… lucky, growing up there. A lot luckier than most people. Suburban childhood. Loads of green space. School with all the other neighbourhood kids. If I got into trouble it was because I made trouble. I didn’t have to work growing up. I mean, I had a weekend job, but that was so I could pay for shit I wanted. I didn’t need it. I was safe. I could have just lived a normal life, and everything would have been fine.”

“For a while,” Omera said, which was possibly the most tactful way Cara had ever heard of saying ‘until the Death Star showed up’. She smiled, and turned her face towards Omera; Omera leaned down and craned her neck to kiss her cheek, brushing the little firebird tattoo high on Cara’s cheekbone. 

“Yeah.” Cara sighed. “I got recruited by the Alliance when I was getting my life together. Early twenties. I ran kind of wild after school, but then I picked myself up, figured I should start making some kind of a plan, something to do with my life. I liked science. I found a college course in chemistry I could get into. There were activists at the university…”   
  


“A cute girl handed you a pamphlet and you followed where she led you,” Omera said, extremely dryly.

Cara grinned. “At first, yeah. But I got pretty deeply into it. Cute girls or no cute girls. My parents were mad as hell when they figured out what was going on - my brother, too, except he mostly just didn’t get it. They weren’t Imperial, they just thought… what was I going to do? How was I going to make a difference, just me? They thought I was going off track again, like this was just another fight for me.” She sighed, and shifted on the bed until her spine stopped creaking, twisted into an unnatural position. Omera moved a little so that her head settled back into place, and carried on stroking Cara’s hair. “The Alliance was keener for me to finish my degree than my parents were. They wanted me to do ordnance. Blow shit up. I was pretty good at it, but after - yeah… I just wanted to fight.”

She fell silent for several long minutes, and then took a deep breath and said: “I was at basic training, when the Death Star came.”

Omera’s hand stilled on Cara’s forehead, and then started up again, tracing smooth, soothing lines through Cara’s dark hair.

“I wasn’t at Scarif,” Cara said. “But I knew people who were.”   
  


“Scarif?”   


  
“The Death Star’s second test. They hit Jedha City, and then Scarif, because Rogue One - a strike team hit the Imp databanks there and got the Death Star plans off-planet. They killed the strike team, but Princess Leia got away with the plans, the rest is history. Or it’s the Battle of Yavin, anyway.” Cara fell silent for a second. “It was a beach planet. Pretty. Like some kind of - tropical resort. And the Imps blasted the  _ shit  _ out of it. Fire and ash. Nothing left but scorched salt and sand for miles around. There were a few people who did make it off Scarif, the last shuttle or so… They said it was green light, and then a wall of white fire.”

“Fire,” Omera repeated.

Cara clenched her eyes and her fists tight shut. “Yeah,” she got out, after a second. “I always wondered if they saw it coming - or -”   
  


Omera wrapped her arms tightly around Cara’s torso, and bent her head to Cara’s. Cara’s eyes felt wet and too hot and sore, squeezed so tightly closed she was seeing patterns on the backs of her eyelids. Her breath had gone short and harsh. Omera had gone completely silent, but her fierce grip on Cara told its own tale.

“No use wondering,” Cara gritted out. “They’re gone, that’s it, there’s no going back.”

Omera turned her head and pressed her lips to Cara’s cheek. They stayed there for a long while; long enough that Cara lost track of time again. Eventually, Omera changed her grip and slid down onto the bed, back probably twinging; Cara shifted round and pulled Omera into her arms, Omera’s back braced against her chest, one of her knees slid between Omera’s, her face buried in Omera’s loose hair.

“You must be the only person I have ever met who finds being the big spoon comforting,” Omera observed. Cara snorted involuntarily, and - when Omera laced her fingers with Cara’s - she held on tight.

Her breath kept hiccuping. Cara wasn’t sure whether or not she was crying, but whatever it was, it was strange and unpleasant. 

“Sshh,” Omera said softly, running her thumb slowly over Cara’s scarred knuckles. “ _ K’uur, cyar’ika. Udesii _ .”

Cara’s breathing eased, slowly and painfully; the inevitable happened, and she breathed in a strand of Omera’s hair and had to back off, clearing her throat. Omera half-smiled, tucked her hair over one shoulder, and turned over so she was face to face with Cara. “Better?”   
  


“I’ve had worse.” Cara took in a deep breath and let it out. She reached out, and stroked Omera’s cheek. “Thanks. I - yeah. I don’t talk about that.”

Omera turned her head to kiss the tips of Cara’s fingers. Cara’s heart jolted, but in a good way.    
  


“It looked painful,” Omera said.

“Yeah.” Another deep breath. “Yeah.” Cara swallowed. “By the way. Cara’s a - it’s a nickname. No-one’s called me anything else for years, but - it’s short for Carasynthia.”   
  


“Carasynthia,” Omera repeated, a perfect match for inflection and accent, and it sounded so right Cara had to shut her eyes again for a second. “It suits you.”   


  
“It does not,” Cara said, eyes still shut. “Too fancy.”

“It sounds like music.”   
  


“I’m not musical.”

“It’s still lovely. Don’t tell me you’re not that either,  _ ka’ra _ .” Omera leaned forward and kissed Cara’s mouth, a soft, easy slide that woke a familiar warmth in the pit of Cara’s stomach, and almost distracted Cara - hands already curling over Omera’s hips - from the unfamiliar Mando’a she’d ended her sentence with.

“What was that?” Cara asked, drawing Omera close again.

“Oh.” Omera flushed a dull red over her cheekbones. “ _ Ka’ra _ . It means star.” 

Cara remembered, suddenly:  _ Not that far off my name, either… There are words that are closer to that. _

Layers on layers, this woman. 

“So I’m a star, then?”

“ _ Ner ka’ra _ ,” Omera said, her eyes as bright and endless as galaxies. “You’re  _ my  _ star.”

Cara let out a breath that felt so light she could float, and summoned up the few words of Mando’a she knew that were not intended to start fights. “ _ ’Lek _ .”

Omera smiled. “ _ Gar serim, _ ” she corrected.

“Huh?”   


  
“You said ‘yeah’,” Omera said, sliding one of her thighs between Cara’s. “ _ Gar serim _ is similar, but stronger. ‘That’s right’ - more or less.” 

“ _ Gar serim _ ,” Cara repeated, and something somewhere in her mind echoed with confidence that - for once in her life - she was right where she needed to be.

  
  


When Winta came back, they had managed to get up and make dinner. Cara had washed under the tap, suddenly feeling crusty with layers of sweat and exhaustion, and found she felt a lot better once she was clean and had eaten something and taken a painkiller for the headache slowly receding from her sinuses. They were lingering over their empty bowls and talking absent-mindedly about the current state of the krill ponds when Winta’s feet echoed on the path outside, and the kid hopped up onto the veranda and scuttled through the door, looking nervous.

  
Cara smiled at her, trying to look healthy and normal and definitely not like someone who had spent an hour weeping in their sleep. Winta didn’t look altogether convinced.

“There you are,” Omera said. “Did you have fun?”

Winta nodded. 

“Good holomovie?” Cara asked, slurping up the last (now rather congealed) noodle in the bottom of her bowl.

“Um, yeah, but it was Miko’s birthday so we had to watch his favourite and I’ve seen it five times.” Winta scrunched up her nose, and both adults laughed. She smiled perfunctorily, but her eyes were uneasy and she kept tangling her fingers and twisting her foot on the floor like she wanted to drill a hole in it with her big toe. “Is everything okay?”   
  
“It’s fine,” Cara said.

“You always say that,” Winta said, with a scowl lifted straight from Omera’s face.

Cara sighed. Omera snorted with amusement. “I know, but this time I actually mean it.”   
  
Winta lifted her chin and went from looking pugnacious to looking alarmingly worried again. “I’m sorry I made you sad.”   
  
“You didn’t make me sad. Blame it on the Empire.” Winta still looked uncertain; Cara opened one arm towards her on pure instinct. “Look. It’s okay.”   
  
Winta’s idea of a hug was pretty much a tackle. Cara rocked sideways on her chair before she regained her balance, and realised the kid was more or less smothering her, but with affectionate intentions. Cara patted her on the back, and unwedged her head until she could look at Omera, who was smiling very softly. Their feet bumped together under the table.

Winta let go and plonked herself down in a chair.

  
“If you want to talk about Alderaan for your project, that would be okay,” Cara said. “Just give me some warning.” 

“Like the earplugs.” 

Omera looked as confused as Cara felt, and then Cara remembered the earplugs she’d given Winta months before, so she could watch the shooting without being upset by the noise. “Yeah. It’s… distance, I guess.”

Winta nodded very seriously. Cara looked down at her cutlery, and moved it around her bowl. 

“I never went to Ciudad Alderá,” she said. “That’s what the capital was called. My brother studied there, at the university. We lived on Isatabith - that was one of the southern continents. Not in the rainforest, though. I did go on a school trip to see the waterfalls once.”

“What were they like?” Winta asked.

Under the table, Omera’s foot pressed against Cara’s. Cara looked up and met her eyes. 

  
“Beautiful,” she said.   



	14. Chapter 14

Fortunately for everyone involved, there was no more trouble while they waited for the group selling the harvest to return. Winta was a little clingier than usual, watching Cara with anxious eyes to be sure she hadn’t upset her again, and Cara herself had a few broken nights of sleep and a few difficult days where she seemed just slightly absent and got slightly twitchy at the faintest hint of smoke. Omera asked, and Cara said that if you looked at them sideways, the woods of Sorgan kind of resembled the subtropical Isatabith rainforest she’d grown up with, even though they looked nothing like them in reality. But she brushed off memories that obviously haunted her with an off-hand reference to having struggled more at Endor, whatever that meant exactly. Omera’s knowledge of galactic political history wasn’t too bad - she kept close tabs on the news and read a lot - but her knowledge of the battles of the Galactic Civil War wasn’t that strong. She had heard of Endor, and knew that it was where the Emperor and Darth Vader had died and the second Death Star had been destroyed, but she didn’t know what that meant for Cara, or what Cara might have seen.

It was enough, Omera hoped, that Cara was willing to lean on her, bar a few small hiccups where Cara had confusedly insisted that Omera kept trying to help everyone else, and it was time someone helped her. Omera had yet to figure out how that would contradict with Cara allowing herself to relax and let someone take care of her for five minutes put together.

The bargaining team led by Yali returned in triumph, with a respectable profit that felt like a victory in the context of the village’s depleted resources, and restocks for a lot of the things they needed: medicines, tools, ammunition. Omera helped pack it all away, and Cara disappeared into the temporary armoury to add the ammunition to her catalogue (and keep it away from curious hands of all ages). Cara was noticeably more relaxed now the village was back to normal strength; still suspicious about the raiders, she had been up and about at irregular hours, had kept the blaster she generally had with her close to hand, and had only nodded when Omera signed out rifles for herself and for the two remaining adults in the village she trusted to keep their heads and not shoot themselves in the foot. It hadn’t been necessary, in the end. Omera was grateful for that. She wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to get Winta to believe she was safe if something like the raiders showed up again, just when they were all letting down their guard.

Well. Omera’s eyes followed Cara, reappearing from the armoury and closing the door behind her. Most of them were letting down their guard.

“We really need something permanent,” Cara said, dusting off her hands.

“I’ll speak to Yali,” Omera said. 

  
  


Drawing the plans fell to her. She asked Cara what they needed, and made a list; it was important to be able to get access easily, but much more important, in a normally peaceful place like this, that kids and idiots couldn’t get in and do themselves a mischief. There was, too, always the possibility that someone might - some way down the line - show themselves to be a worse neighbour or a worse partner than they might all hope, and it needed to be possible to lock out people who might do them all harm. Omera absently sketched a simple fingerprint code panel into her plans: far from foolproof, but probably the best balance they had, and inexpensive to install. Then, too, there was the problem of location and the high water table. Like most of the buildings, it’d need to be on stilts. It would need to be on  _ higher  _ stilts, just in case. It needed to be solid, it needed to be well-protected from the lightning storms and the floods, it needed to  _ last _ .

And they needed to be able to pay for materials, and possibly building expertise, although Omera considered that the less outsiders knew about exactly how much they had to work with the better it would be for all of them. Omera sketched on her datapad, ran through cost estimates, dragged Jorgan in to consult because he was probably the best builder they had. All this on top of daily work: Omera was grateful to have someone to share the housework with, and that the ponds no longer required intensive daily care to stop the krill spawn dying off.

“I had no idea you were this good,” Cara said one evening, peering over her shoulder.

“I have hidden talents,” Omera said, waving her off with a stylus. Cara put a cup of tea down by her elbow instead. 

“I thought you were a secret artist. This is… blueprints, and shit.” Cara sat down opposite her, craning her neck to see the drawing on the screen of Omera’s datapad.

“I don’t have the proper programmes or anything,” Omera said, swiping an ad for Mon Calamari tech at improbably low prices out of the way with the point of her stylus and correcting a line. “Only what I can do with free software.” 

“That’s just more impressive - you know that, right.” 

“I used to take classes, when I worked in the factory.” Omera zoomed out to check her work, and then laid down her stylus and picked up her cup of tea. “I thought I could work my way up and become a designer. They held design competitions, sometimes, and I was - I wasn’t  _ amazing  _ at the work, but I did a lot of research. I knew what worked and what didn’t, and I could see gaps in things, and figure out what might work better.” She sighed. “There’s a lot else to it, though. Cost-effectiveness, and labour, and…”   
  


“All that crap.”   
  
Omera nodded. “There were classes in that as well, but I could only afford to audit a couple of classes, and I couldn’t pay for the exams or certification anyway, so...” She shrugged. “The whole-company competitions were my best chance. But I never heard of anyone off the factory floor winning one.”   
  
“You wanted to be an engineer?” Cara ran a finger around the rim of her cup. She’d always used the same one, since she’d first come to live with Omera: a woman of habit who wanted to pretend she had no ties to solid ground, that she could get up and go without feeling the slightest twinge of regret. It was a pretty solid shield of pretence, in the sense that it had initially fooled Omera, but it had stopped working a while ago.

Omera laughed. “I just wanted not to work on the factory floor.” 

“You should go back to school,” Cara said, and, when Omera laughed again, added: “I mean it. You’re  _ clever _ .”   


  
“Thank you.” Omera smiled.

Cara gestured with her cup. “I mean, you’re welcome. But look, why aren’t you studying?”   
  


Omera stretched out her legs and tapped her stylus on the table. “I could have sworn we’d talked about this. You need documentation or money to register for classes to make up secondary school, and I don’t have either.”

“There’s got to be some kind of way.”   


  
Omera felt her hackles rising slightly. “Trust me. I’ve tried everything.”

Cara put her cup down. “I just think this is a waste of what you’ve got. I mean, besides the shooting, which is streets and cities ahead of anything anyone else can manage around here -”

“Thank you,” Omera interrupted, feeling herself flush from chest to neck to cheeks. Cara kept practising with her, one on one, a fact Yali had not been slow to tease her about; it was true she was getting better, she could feel old muscles and trained instincts returning, and Cara was appreciative of that. Vocally.

It was nice, Omera could admit, to be told that she was beautiful, and intelligent, and talented. Yoser had complimented her all the time until he’d found out who she really was, but his compliments had mostly focused on her body, and had died away once he’d decided that she was both a liar and genetically constructed for optimum physicality, so any compliments were due to the cloners rather than her. It wasn’t the same as the way Cara looked at her, with wide eyes like the mere sight of Omera had stopped her in her tracks. However, occasionally it got overwhelming. And in this particular case Cara had completely missed the point.

“- you are brilliant.” Cara shrugged awkwardly. “I mean it.”

Omera took a deep breath, and thought carefully about her response. “I’m glad,” she said, in her most measured voice. “It’s… nice, to hear that.” Cara scoffed slightly, and Omera glared her into silence. “But it’s not important to me to try to… I don’t know, make something different out of myself. I am what I am and I do what I can for myself, and it’s enough. The most important thing to me is that my family is safe. The second most important thing to me is that my daughter gets an education. Chasing schooling for myself at the expense of those things is -  _ not  _ acceptable.”   
  


“Yeah, all these things don’t actually have to get in the way of each other -”

“Just trust my judgement, please,” Omera interrupted again, feeling her temper rise.

  
“I do, but -”   


  
The door to Winta’s bedroom slid open, and they both shut up very abruptly as they looked round. Winta looked pale and suspicious. 

“I thought you were asleep,” Omera said, cursing herself for not finding some way to shut Cara up earlier. If the noise had disturbed Winta -

Winta shook her head, and knuckled one eye with her fist. “I want a glass of water.”   
  


“Of course, _ ad’ika _ .”

Cara got up and poured a glass of water, and held it out to Winta. Winta scuffled over in bare feet and took it, but showed no signs of going back to bed. She squinted between Cara and Omera.

“Are you fighting?” she said, eventually.

“No,” Omera said.

“Adults get annoyed at each other sometimes,” Cara said, carefully casual. “Doesn’t mean they don’t like each other.”   
  


Omera smiled unwillingly. “I’m allowed to disagree with Cara. Cara’s allowed to disagree with me.” She got up, laid her hands on Winta’s shoulders and pulled her in for a hug. “If someone ever gets angry because you disagree with them - not because they think your opinion is wrong, but because they think you shouldn’t have an opinion - that’s bad. But having different opinions is normal. It’s a good thing.”   


  
Winta hummed. She still looked suspicious. 

Omera nudged her gently in the direction of her bedroom. “You should be sleeping,  _ ad’ika _ .”

“All right, fine,” Winta grumbled, bumped into Omera and Cara in turn in some kind of sleepy approximation of a hug, and went back to bed.

Cara and Omera were left looking at each other. “She definitely remembers something,” Cara said, under her breath.

  
“Either that, or her life has been unstable enough to start with,” Omera replied, in the same tone. 

Cara opened her mouth and closed it again. “Look, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have started shit.” 

Omera shrugged. “You meant well. We can talk about it another time.” She tilted her head gently towards Winta’s door, now closed. Mostly closed. Omera hoped Winta wasn’t trying to eavesdrop.

Cara nodded. She curled a hand around Omera’s elbow and drew her in close - apparently not to kiss her, just to hold her, just for the pleasure of having her close. Omera closed her eyes and basked in it. And then yawned, which made Cara laugh. 

“I’m going to bed,” she said. “Are you coming?”   


  
“Almost,” Omera said. “I want to finish this draft.”

  
  


The next day Omera took a rifle and joined Cara on one of her patrols. Not that they were expecting to find anything - Omera knew that Cara had originally been convinced the raiders would be back, but they’d seen no signs of it - but it didn’t pay to be incautious. And it might help to ward off commentary about the two of them wandering off into the woods in the middle of the day.

Omera did not have high hopes for that one.

Cara had clearly defined her own set of patrol paths, which she was following: Omera knew the land around the village very well indeed, but she didn’t know the routes that Cara was taking out into the woods, or where she intended to go, so she just followed along and hoped they didn’t land in a teckfish pond. It seemed unlikely. She was pretty confident she knew where they were in relation to those, and they were still some considerable way away. 

“Credit for them,” Cara threw over her shoulder.

“My thoughts? I was wondering where we were going.” 

  
“Somewhere far enough that you can really get mad at me if you want to.” Cara reached up and slapped one of the trees; Omera’s eyes followed her hand, and she saw that it had a healing scar on it where branches had been ripped off. Similar half-healed devastation tracked through the forest about them. “This is about where Mando and I figured out they had an AT-ST.”

“And got angry at us for not telling you,” Omera said dryly, remembering the scene. “I don’t suppose it occurred to either of you that none of us had ever seen an AT-ST. I built X-wings, not Imperial hardware, and I’m the only adult who’s ever been off-planet.”

“The Imps didn’t use them on Hays Minor?”   


  
“We were in a canyon city and all the locals had mining explosives, so no.” Omera trod carefully on the path. “Troopers and light armour only.”

Cara stopped and turned. “Just curious - what did you think the giant footprints were?”   


  
“I thought Jorgan was drunk and frightened,” Omera said acidly. “It rained heavily overnight, and when he took us back to where he saw the huge feet, as he called them, there was nothing left.”   


  
Cara laughed from the very bottom of her chest. “Shit, well. I can’t blame you for that.” 

"Thanks," Omera said sarcastically. Cara grinned at her, not even slightly taken aback. 

They carried on walking for about another quarter of an hour, and Omera, tracking their progress in her mind, realised that they were now curving away from the village in a broad circle. The tall reddish trees and low fern cover surrounded them for kilometres in every direction; no-one was at all likely to stumble across them, let alone hear them if they took to shouting.

"So what are we doing here?" she said. "Waiting for one of us to start talking?" 

"I was going to kick off by apologising." 

Omera blinked in surprise. Cara stopped and turned, giving her a lopsided, rueful smile.

"I know how important lying low here is to you. I should have laid off." 

Omera sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. They started walking again, this time side by side. "It's true," she said. "I would like to study more - I would like to finish school." She took a deep breath. "But that has to come second, do you see? I want Winta to - have what I didn't. Any parent would. And that means keeping her somewhere where she can be safe and where she can learn."

"So, forgetting the whole raiders thing for the moment, what are you going to do when she grows out of distance learning?" Cara tilted a knowing eyebrow at her.

"Cross that bridge when I get to it,” Omera sighed. It was something she’d thought about. In the best-case scenario, they’d have to move an eight-hour journey from home; there were few major towns on Sorgan, and the only one that supported a good secondary school was well beyond the town where they sold krill. Most children boarded, but there was no question in Omera’s mind that she would go with Winta. 

Cara let this go, which was so kind it was irritating.

“I don’t know where you think I’d get qualifications anyway,” Omera said. “To go private, you need money. To access state education, you need documents. And I don’t exist on paper except for Winta’s birth certificate and my marriage certificate, which is based on a fraud, and a fifteen-year-old Corellian work certificate, which is entirely fake. That’s not enough to prove identity for most places. I can’t show my own daughter’s birth certificate to prove who I am.”   
  


“You’ve tried,” Cara said.

Omera nodded reluctantly. She stepped over a protruding tree root, and stared ahead into the forest. 

“Look,” Cara said, and sighed. “I don’t think you’re as safe here as you think you are. You’re just isolated. Yes, it’s a backwater, but hell, Mando thought he was safe to leave the kid with you, and then look what happened.”

“I think about it a lot.” Winta had had nightmares about that blaster shot from nowhere, and so had she. Omera shuddered, and put her weight into her feet as she stepped forward, grounding herself. “But you know, that doesn’t happen  _ often _ .”

Cara shrugged. “It’s your call. You know this place better than I do. But…” She stopped, eyes flicking up and around like she was thinking, scraping her teeth over her lower lip. “You’re stuck, here. I know you’re doing it for Winta, but - look.” She shifted her weight on her feet like she was nervous. “You deserve better than somewhere that takes you for granted, treats you like an outsider,  _ never  _ gives you your due. You have so much going for you. You deserve a shot at living bigger than a backwater skugg hole -”   


  
“Careful,” Omera said, unable to resist turning a joke to try to break the tension and deflect Cara’s words. “That’s my home.”   
  


Cara pointed at her. “I know you agree with me. You deserve to put down roots somewhere people actually  _ value  _ you. And there has to be a way to get you back into school. Somehow. Omera, you’re not meant for this. One day you’re going to be living somewhere with an actual connection to the holonet that doesn’t drop all the time and all the books you want, and you’ll finish school, and you’ll get to university, you’ll -”

“And where will you be?” Omera said. 

Cara stopped in full flow, closed her mouth, and then opened it again. “That doesn’t matter.”   


  
“It matters to me.” Omera’s breath had gone thin in her lungs. She shook her head and drew in a deep inhale. “Any home that’s mine is - is yours.”

“Omera,” Cara said, sounding like she’d just been punched in the stomach. “I -”

“Don’t tell me it’s not possible,” Omera said, hearing an angry edge in her own voice. “Don’t tell me it’s impossible when you’re the one building -  _ palaces  _ in deep space about how I’m going to go to  _ university _ , one day. Don’t tell me there are all these - hypotheticals I should want, when I know exactly which sure thing I want.”   
  


Cara looked at her like Cara was lost. “Don’t pick me over your future. I’m just a washed-up dropper with a bounty on her head.”   
  


“ _ Gar ner ka’ra _ ,” Omera retorted, flinging her hands up in the air. “I don’t care. I’m staying here, with my daughter, and if you get to dream about me building some marvellous life built on foundations I haven’t got, I get to dream about you coming home.”

Cara wrapped her arms around her, mostly avoiding the rifle still slung over her back, and held tight. “I don't have to go today,” she said, and Omera dug her hands into Cara’s shoulders and neck like she could keep her here through sheer force of grip. “Maybe not tomorrow.”

“You have given me - so  _ much _ ,” Omera said. Her voice had gone stilted and hard in her throat. “I don’t think you even know.”

Cara exhaled hard.

“If you tell me you’re washed up again,” Omera warned, gripping the back of Cara’s neck.

“No, fine, I won’t,” Cara said, muffled, and drew herself away from Omera’s grip by main force so she could cup Omera’s face in her roughened hands and make Omera meet her eyes. “But I don’t believe your story ends on Sorgan. I just don’t fucking buy that. I don’t think anyone with a pair of eyes could. Even Mando could see it from behind that helmet of his.”

Omera shrugged. “Lots of people live and die without ever reaching any great heights. It doesn’t mean they’re not happy.”

“Are you happy with this life?” Cara was starting to sound like she was pleading for something. “Is this enough?”

“It’s what I’ve got,” Omera said. “I’ll make it be enough. So Winta can have choices.”

Cara almost laughed. “Can’t you be selfish enough to care about yourself for once?”

“We get what we get, Cara,” Omera said, smiling, knowing it had a bitter edge. “We make out of it what we can. If this is what I get, a few months with you, that will be enough.”

“Oh,  _ fuck _ ,” Cara said. “You need to raise your standards, sweetheart.”

“My standards are exactly where I want them.” Omera leaned in and rested her forehead against Cara’s, breathed in and out in time with the slow rhythm of Cara’s chest rising and falling. “Come home,” she whispered. “For as long as we’ve got it.”

There was a long pause. Omera closed her eyes and hoped.

“Yeah,” Cara whispered back.


	15. Chapter 15

The bounty hunter came with the travelling market. The market, with its gravsleds and caravans of goods and clerks and the rotating library, stopped outside the ring of krill ponds that surrounded the village, but the bounty hunter hopped off the gravsled he’d caught a lift on and sauntered further in among the houses.

He said he was looking for Cara Dune, an old comrade of his from Endor days, and Jorgan was only too happy to point him to the right house.

Omera saw him approach her house, and a warning pinched at the back of her neck as she saw the way he walked and remembered how stormtroopers moved; distrust drew the rifle off her back and into her arms, and she opened her mouth to call a challenge, saw Winta open the door to him, heard Cara yell -

_ Don't hesitate. _

Omera shot the bounty hunter twice in the back with a silenced Klatooinian blaster rifle and watched him fall at her daughter's feet.

Jorgan yelped.

“Shut up,” Omera snarled. “Shut  _ up _ .”

She slung the rifle over her back and ran to the house. Winta was crying in a way she recognised, near silently, her eyes wide with terror and her breath hitching; Cara had knelt down next to her and was holding her shoulders tightly, talking to her quietly, but both Cara and Winta had their eyes on the body. He was dead, of course: at that range, Omera couldn't miss.

Omera stepped over the bounty hunter’s body without thinking about it and dropped to the floor next to her daughter, who threw herself into Omera’s arms, weeping. Omera scooped her up and carried her inside. 

“What did you  _ do _ ,” Jorgan squeaked. He had followed them. Omera didn’t remember giving him permission to enter her  _ godsdamn  _ house. Although technically he was still on the veranda.

“Bounty hunter came here to kill me,” Cara said. Now that Winta was in good hands, she had dragged the body out of sight from the path and was efficiently sorting through its pockets. “I would’ve killed him. Omera spared me a lot of trouble and a lot of noise. Nice save, sweetheart.” 

Omera did not dignify that with an answer. She sat down on the daybed instead, and arranged her daughter over her lap, stroking her hair and watching Cara. Cara turned up the bounty puck, a lot of weapons, and some money, all of which she pocketed. 

“How was I supposed to  _ know _ ,” Jorgan wailed. “What are we going to  _ do _ ?”

“You’re going to help me dump the body,” Cara said, “as soon as it gets dark.” She cast a look at Winta, whose breathing had turned to whistles. Omera rubbed her back in slow, soothing circles. “Actually, make that now.”   


  
“We’ll be seen!”    
  


“Cut the fucking attitude and help me get this thing out of here before the kid passes out, you gullible little shit.”

“You can’t talk to me like that!”

“I just did,” Cara said, a faint growl edging her words.

“Jorgan,” Omera said. Her voice sounded like it had been strangled to a thread. “This is your fault. Do as she says.  _ Get that corpse out of my house _ .” 

Cara was back half an hour later, minus Jorgan or the dead body. Winta had had a panic attack, then calmed down, and was now sleeping uneasily. Omera was wiping her sweaty face and the back of her neck down with a cool cloth, and Cara waited until Omera had finished and walked out onto the veranda to join her before saying anything. Omera closed the door.

“Please tell me you didn’t also get rid of Jorgan,” Omera said. “We need every adult we have.”

Cara’s mouth curled in that way Omera particularly liked. “Tempting, but no.” They sat down on the veranda, backs against the wall. “We dumped the idiot in one of the ponds that has teckfish in. Messed up the ground, made it look like he slipped and fell. By now his own mother wouldn’t recognise him, and you’d need to do a full autopsy to know he was killed with a rifle. Pretty shooting, by the way.”

That dragged a smile to Omera’s unwilling mouth. “You always think my shooting’s pretty.”

“That’s ’cause you’re just that good.” Cara laid her hand over Omera’s, and Omera turned her own over so they were palm to palm and interlaced their fingers. “Don’t give me the silent treatment.”

“He came here to kill you,” Omera said.

“I was going to win.” 

“You don’t know that.”   
  


“Yeah, I do.” 

“You have to leave now,” Omera said. It wasn’t an order; it was a deduction. She saw Cara’s face fall, and knew Cara knew what she meant. “Don’t you?”

Cara gripped her hand tight. “Yeah. I can’t bring this down on you and the kid. Even if you are the best shot in the system.”

“Don’t try to be  _ funny  _ about this.” 

Cara looked at Omera like she knew her, and released Omera’s hand to hold her arms out to her instead. Omera sighed, and slung her legs across Cara’s lap, and rested her head against Cara’s broad shoulder, her face nuzzled against Cara’s neck; and there she closed her eyes. Cara wrapped her arms around Omera, and let her cheek rest against the top of Omera’s head. Her hands were ostentatiously clean, like she’d scrubbed up to the elbows after ditching the bounty hunter’s corpse.

“Wouldn’t go if I had a choice,” Cara murmured. “You know that.”

“When you get clear of the chain code,” Omera replied, “come and find me.”

“Will Winta still remember my name?”

“I’ll tell it to her,” Omera said. “I’ll tell her not to forget.”

Cara craned her neck to kiss Omera’s forehead. Omera closed her eyes. 

  
  


Winta woke up in time for dinner; it was probably the smell of the food that did it. Omera had two plates and a casserole in hand, so it was Cara that went to her, as soon as she made a noise.

“Is the bad man gone?” Winta said, in her smallest voice.

  
“Very gone, kid,” Cara said, stroking Winta’s loosened hair off her face. “ _ Super _ gone. Don’t worry about him.”

“There’s never just one,” Winta said, sounding too old. Omera put the casserole down before she dropped it, and leaned her head against the wall.

“There was just one of him,” Cara said, and hesitated audibly. “But more guys like him might come. So I’m going to have to go and… deal with them, before they deal with me.”

“You’re going away.” Another little girl might have shouted it; Winta was just resigned. “Like Mando. And little green.”

There was a brief pause. “Yeah,” Cara said, sounding defeated. “I’m sorry, Win. Couldn’t live with myself if you or your mom got hurt because I outstayed my welcome.”

“I want you to stay.”

Omera squeezed her eyes tight shut, and bit the inside of her cheek so hard she drew blood.   
  


“I want me to stay,” Cara said. “I’m not going to get what I want, because if I do, you won’t be safe. And that matters more than anything I want.” She lifted Winta out of the daybed without any noticeable effort. “Come on. Big girls eat at the table, not sitting in bed.”

  
  


At dawn the next morning Omera woke Cara, and took her out to the practice range with the rifle.

“Throw it for me,” she said, settling the butt of the rifle into her shoulder. “The puck.”

Cara knuckled one eye, stared at Omera with the other, and then took the bounty puck out of her pocket and threw it high into the air. Omera tracked its arc with her eyes; on the exhale, she squeezed the trigger, and watched a single silenced round burst through the puck, shattering it into so much plastic and metal. Shards rained down across the range; Cara covered her eyes and Omera bent her head.

“That’s still really hot,” Cara observed. 

“I know what you like,” Omera said.

Cara laughed, louder and brighter than the blaster shot, and stepped as easily into Omera’s space as Omera moved into hers. She slid her hands into Omera’s hair, and kissed her like she didn’t have to go, like this wasn’t over, like Omera’s eyes weren’t stinging.

“Hell of a goodbye,” Omera said. “I’m still holding a rifle.”

  
  
“Well put it down then,” Cara said, backing her gently but inexorably into a tree. “And it’s not goodbye.”   


  
“What is it, then?”

“Until our paths cross,” Cara said. She was smiling; her dark eyes were so bright it hurt to look at them.

“ _ Ret’urcye mhi _ ,” Omera translated, and put the rifle on the ground. “Maybe we’ll meet again.”

“Until then,” Cara said, and stole all Omera’s words with her own lips.


End file.
